S)ixt  S>tU  to  (Bttett  anu  Eomt 

EDITORS 

George  Depue  Hadzsits,  Ph.D. 

University  of  Pennsylvania 

David  Moore  Robinson,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

The  Johns  Hopkins  University 


CONTRIBUTORS  TO  THE  "  OUR  DEBT  TO 

GREECE   AND    ROME    FUND,"   WHOSE 

GENEROSITY  HAS  MADE  POSSIBLE 

THE  LIBRARY 


SDixt  S>tbt  to  (Butte  anti  IRomt 


Philadelphia 
Dr.  Astley  p.  C.  Ashhurst 
John  C.  Bell 
Henry  H.  Bonnell 
Jasper  Yeates  Brinton 
John  Cadwalader 
Miss  Clara  Comegys 
Miss  Mary  E.  Converse 
Arthur  G.  Dickson 
William  M.  Elkins 
William  P.  Gest 
John  Gribbel 
Samuel  F.  Houston 
Alba  B.  Johnson 
Miss  Nina  Lea 
Mrs.  John  Markoe 
Jules  E.  Mastbaum 
J.  Vaughan  Merrick 
Effingham  B.  Morris 
William  R.  Murphy 
John  S.  Newbold 
S.  Davis  Page  (memorial) 
Owen  J.  Roberts 
Joseph  G.  Rosengarten 
John  B.  Stetson,  Jr. 
Dr.  J.  William  White 

(memorial) 

The  Philadelphia  Society 
for  the  Promotion  of  Liberal 
Studies. 


Boston 
Oric  Bates  (memorial) 
Frederick  P.  Fish 
William  Amory  Gardner 
Joseph  Clark  Hoppin 

Chicago 
Herbert  W.  Wolff 

Detroit 
John  W.  Anderson 
Dexter  M.  Ferry,  Jr. 

New  York 
John  Jay  Chapman 
Willard  V.  King 
Mortimer  L.  Schiff 
William  Sloane 
And    one    contributor,    who 

has  asked  to  have  his  name 

withheld. 

Maecenas  atavis  edite  regtbus, 
O  et  praesidium  et  dulce  decus 
meum. 

Washington 
The    Greek    Embassy    at 
Washington,  for  the  Greek 
Government. 


[ii] 


SENECA  THE  PHILOSOPHER 
AND  HIS  MODERN  MESSAGE 


BY 

RICHARD  MOTT  GUMMERE 

HEADMASTER 
Tbg  William  Penn  CbarUr  School 


MARSHALL  JONES  COMPANY 

BOSTON  •  MASSACHUSETTS 


COPYRIGHT  •  1922  •  BY  MARSHALL  JONES  COMPANY 


Entered  at  Stationers*  Hall,  London 


All  rights  reserved 
Printed  May,  1922 


THE  PLIMPTON  PKKSS  •  NOR  WOO  D  'MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED    IN     THE    UNITED    STATES    OP    AMERICA 


to 


THE  MEMORY  OF  MY  FATHER 

FRANCIS  BARTON  GUMMERE 

Vivit:  ad  posteros  iisque  transiluit  et  se  in 
memoriam  dediL    (Seneca) 

"He  lives  in  life  that  ends  not  with  his  breath." 


O 


476362 


EDITORS'    PREFACE 

THE  LIBRARY,  "  Our  Debt  to  Greece 
and  Rome,"  should  reveal  the  inher- 
ited permanent  factors  in  the  civiliza- 
tion of  the  twentieth  century  which  have 
resisted  the  effects  of  chance  and  time  and 
outlived  the  ephemeral  experiments  of  man. 
Those  classifications  of  our  intellectual,  moral 
and  spiritual  life,  which  have  had  their  origin 
in  the  Greek  and  Roman  world  and  which 
have  steadied  human  life  and  thinking  ever 
since,  are  today  of  enormous  importance  for 
determining  the  aim  and  direction  of  life  and 
for  creating  a  sense  of  unity  in  life.  These 
elements  in  our  life  are  the  bases  of  civiliza- 
tion, upon  which  the  fancy  and  imagination  of 
the  human  mind  may  build,  but  without  which 
or  without  knowledge  of  which,  life  sails  upon 
an  uncharted  sea.  Whether  in  philosophy,  sci- 
ence or  religion,  in  literature  or  language,  in 
art  or  architecture,  or  in  political  thinking  we 
are  so  largely  Greek  and  Roman,  European 
and  American  civilizations  are  so  shot  through 

[vli] 


EDITORS*   PREFACE 

and  through  with  the  ancient  traditions  and 
habits  of  thought,  that  we  can  understand  our- 
selves and  our  institutions  only  as  we  compre- 
hend that  large  inherited  element  and  the 
history  of  its  influence.  "  We  think  in  terms 
like  those  idiomatic  in  Rome  and  Greece."  The 
Hebraic  mood  and  mind,  alone,  of  the  ancient 
past,  possess  a  hold  comparable  to  that  of 
Greece  and  Rome  upon  our  thinking  and  imag- 
ination. Greece  has  been  the  source  of  most 
of  our  aspirations,  and  Rome,  the  great  medi- 
ator. 

An  account  of  the  long-continued  Influence 
of  these  ancient  forces,  the  vicissitudes  of 
their  acceptance,  of  correct  or  of  false  applica- 
tion or  even  of  rejection,  possess  a  peculiar 
charm  and  fascination.  This  Library  will  fur- 
nish a  fresh  appraisal  of  these  Influences  and 
will  point  out  the  values  of  ancient  forms  as  a 
constant  guidance  to  human  endeavor,  as  a 
constant  corrective  in  the  midst  of  crises,  as  a 
constant  inspiration  for  a  better  world.  It  is 
this  aspect  of  human  history  that  will  engage 
the  writers  of  the  volumes  in  this  Series,  who 
may  thereby  contribute  much,  not  merely  to  a 
better  understanding  of  this  historical  phenom- 
enon, but  also  to  a  true  recognition  of  the 

[  viii  ] 


EDITORS^    PREFACE 

supreme  importance  to  civilization  of  those  ele- 
ments of  the  ancient  world  that  are  deathless. 
A  clear  exposition,  therefore,  of  those  inher- 
ited elements,  of  their  survival  through  medi- 
eval Europe,  of  their  effects  upon  the  Renais- 
sance, upon  later  European  and  American  civi- 
lization, of  their  influence  today,  should  lead  to 
a  clearer  understanding  of  ourselves,  which  is 
the  first  essential  for  true  progress.  To  what 
extent  that  legacy  will  possess  value  for  the 
future,  time  alone  will  tell.  Far  from  advo- 
cating stereotyped  thinking  according  to  tradi- 
tional forms,  which  we  must  constantly  revise, 
we  should  at  least  as  individuals,  as  a  society, 
as  a  civilization,  know  ourselves  in  order  to 
establish  a  firm  foundation  for  a  new  specula- 
tion and  for  a  new  freedom,  in  order  to  attain 
an  independence  that  is  truly  rational.  If  from 
the  past  some  traditions  have  come  that  serve 
as  unworthy  inhibitions,  we  shall  come  to  know 
their  unworthiness  only  by  a  study  of  their 
historic  development.  On  the  other  hand,  we 
predict  a  clear  revelation,  through  the  pages  of 
this  new  Series,  of  many  abiding  values,  whose 
merit  is  determined  not  merely  by  fancied 
vested  rights  existing  in  tradition,  but  estab- 
lished by  reason  of  inherent  worth  and  trial. 

[ix] 


It  is  the  hope  of  the  Editors  that  these  eter- 
nal principles  that  have  animated  and  actuated 
life  so  long  will  stand  out  more  clearly  by 
reason  of  the  books  of  this  Library,  and  that, 
in  consequence,  the  riddle  of  the  Sphinx,  which 
is  the  riddle  of  existence,  will  seem  a  little  less 
forbidding. 

The  volume  on  Seneca  by  Doctor  Gummere 
is  the  first  to  appear  in  the  Series,  known  as 
"  Our  Debt  to  Greece  and  Rome." 

The  volume  represents  an  effort  to  explain, 
as  far  as  may  be  possible  within  the  limits  of 
a  small  volume,  the  nature  and  extent  of  the 
influence  of  the  philosophy  of  Seneca,  which 
has  been  of  perennial  interest  and  importance 
through  the  ages  following  the  life,  work  and 
death  of  the  great  Roman  philosopher  and 
statesman  of  the  empire. 

That  such  an  influence  has  persisted  is  of 
sufficient  interest  to  mark  the  philosophy  of 
Seneca  as  one  of  broad  character  and  of  vital 
content.  For  S)^tems  rise  and  fall,  men  come 
and  go,  and  the  whims  of  Time  pay  little  heed 
to  the  irrelevant  and  the  insignificant. 

The  reader  will  discover  the  underlying  rea- 
sons for  the  continued  appeal  of  Seneca's  mes- 
sage and  mission  to  the  Europe  of  later  date, 

[x] 


editors'   preface 

not  to  mention  a  still  further  sweep  of  that 
religious  and  ethical  system  into  the  thought, 
life  and  literature  of  another  people  across  the 
seas.  That  Seneca  still  lives,  that  the  modern- 
ity of  Seneca  is  characteristic  of  a  mind  trans- 
cending the  limits  of  time  and  space,  that 
Seneca  will  continue  to  mold  human  aspira- 
tions, these  are  some  of  the  inevitable  conclu- 
sions from  a  reading  of  the  essay  that  follows. 


[xi] 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

Contributors  to  the  Fund    .     .  ii 

Editor's  Preface vii 

Author's  Preface xv 

I.    The  Old  and  the  New.     ...  3 
II.    Seneca:  His  Influence  Upon  Pag- 
an Rome 31 

III.  How  He  Appealed  to  the  Church  53 

IV.  How  He  Touched  the  Medieval 

Mind 81 

V.    How   the    Renaissance    Viewed 

Him 88 

VI.    Montaigne  and  the  Elizabethans  105 
VII.    The  Modern  View:  From  Bacon 

TO  THE  Twentieth  Century    .  114 

VIII.    Conclusions 135 

Notes 141 

Bibliography 145 


[  xiii  ] 


PREFACE 

LUCIUS  ANNAEUS  SENECA,  the  prime 
minister  of  Nero,  the  outstanding  figure 
of  his  age,  and  the  author  of  many 
poHtical  and  philosophical  experiments,  was  far 
ahead  of  his  contemporaries.  That  is  the  chief 
reason  for  the  very  downright  opinions,  pro 
and  cofiy  which  have  been  expressed  during 
nineteen  centuries  regarding  his  personality  and 
his  works.  However  varyingly  the  world  has 
rated  him,  the  last  two  decades  have  brought 
him  into  his  own.  Instead  of  a  gossip-laden 
courtier,  Seneca  has  been  proved  a  constructive 
statesman;  instead  of  a  second-hand  philoso- 
pher, he  has  come  to  be  viewed  as  the  Bossuet 
of  Imperial  Rome,  lacking  the  simplicity  of 
Musonius  and  Epictetus,  but  handling  his  con- 
temporaries without  gloves  and  advising  them 
as  the  French  bishop  advised  the  circle  of 
Louis  XIV.  There  is  no  doubt  that  fuller  in- 
vestigation reveals  him  as  a  man  of  originality, 
vitality  and  power. 

It  is  this  disregard  of  crusted  tradition  that 
any  unbiased  student  of  Seneca's  writings  will 

[XV] 


PREFACE 

note  with  interest.  The  inner  light  of  the  Spirit, 
the  sacred  freedom  of  the  individual,  the 
greater  respect  due  to  women,  the  disapproval 
of  slavery  and  gladiatorial  combats,  the  work- 
ability of  philosophy,  the  need  of  bringing 
personal  standards  into  public  life, —  all  these 
motifs,  taken  together,  form  a  system  of  living 
which  marks  an  advance  over  his  ancient  pre- 
decessors and  contemporaries.  He  is,  without 
doubt,  one  of  the  world's  wise  men,  as  Emerson 
testifies:  "  Make  your  own  Bible.  Select  and 
collect  all  the  words  and  sentences  that  in  all 
your  reading  have  been  to  you  like  the  blast  of 
triumph  out  of  Shakespeare,  Seneca,  Moses, 
John  and  Paul," 

It  is  accordingly  the  aim  of  this  brief  study 
to  show  how  extensive  has  been  the  influence 
of  his  style,  his  thought,  his  experiment  in 
philosopher-kingship,  and  the  essential  spiritu- 
ality of  his  message. 


[xvi] 


SENECA  THE  PHILOSOPHER 
AND  HIS  MODERN  MESSAGE 


SENECA  THE  PHILOSOPHER 
AND  HIS  MODERN  MESSAGE 

I.    THE    OLD    AND    THE    NEW 

THE  ROMAN  of  the  Republic  was  a 
pragmatist.  His  interests  were  centred 
upon  money,  farming,  engineering, 
law,  oratory,  and  government.  His  literature 
was  not  original,  and  his  mind  was  not  specu- 
lative. Even  his  religion  was  as  distinctly 
formulated  as  the  other  elements  in  his  life; 
and  with  regard  to  philosophy,  Ennius  had 
warned  him,  in  the  second  century  B.C.,  "  to 
bathe,  but  not  to  wallow  in  it," 

When  he  grew  rich,  after  the  downfall  of 
Carthage,  he  had  cosmopolitanism  and  imperi- 
alism thrust  upon  him.  He  had  some  leisure. 
He  bought  bronzes,  or  laid  out  fancy  gardens, 
or  listened  furtively  to  the  novelties  of  Greek 
philosophy.  Such  a  man  would  not  be  carried 
away  by  a  creed  of  mystic  aloofness.  He  would 
be  interested  in  a  system  that  combined  theory 

[3] 


:;,''.         &ENE^CA     tHE     PHILOSOPHER 

-:>  i  M?i[th  practice.    And  of  all  the  Greek  schools  of 
'"  thbugtit  he  was  most  attracted  by  Stoicism, 

This  was  the  "  world-citizen  "  creed  which 
believed  knowledge  to  be  attainable  and  defined 
virtue  as  something  different  from  the  laissez- 
faire  watchword  of  Epicureanism.  It  held  to  a 
regular  sequence  of  sensation,  mind-picture, 
concept,  and  knowledge.  Stoicism  bade  the 
wise  man  master  the  science  of  government  and 
the  arts  of  speaking  and  writing.  And  further- 
more, it  promised  a  glimpse  of  immortality.  All 
the  other  creeds  of  Greece  were  represented 
in  Rome,  but,  as  the  Republic  ended  and  the 
Empire  began.  Stoicism  was  the  acknowledged 
leader. 

Finally,  in  the  period  following  Augustus, 
from  14  A.D.  for  many  years.  Stoicism  became 
more  than  an  aid  to  affairs;  it  grew  into  a  spirit- 
ual prop.  When  public  discussion  was  muzzled, 
when  the  Senate  was  a  figurehead  and  the  gov- 
ernment a  bureaucracy,  this  school  of  thought 
betook  itself  into  the  lecture-hall,  the  salon,  and 
the  home  as  a  remedy  and  a  comfort.  Epi- 
cureans were  indifferent;  Academics  met  the 
situation  by  falling  back  upon  learned  doubt; 
Stoicism,  however,  began  a  line  of  thinkers 
which  terminated  with  Marcus  Aurelius  but  in- 

[4] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

eluded,  besides  the  well-known  leaders,  many 
an  unheralded  experimenter  in  spiritual  en- 
durance, physical  courage,  or  mental  defiance. 
There  was  no  creed  that  more  closely  resembled 
the  coming  Christianity  than  this  Eastern-born 
gospel  of  clear-thinking  patience. 

As  philosophy  proceeded  from  a  plaything  to 
a  creed,  so  government,  by  the  time  of  the  Em- 
perors, had  changed  from  a  by-product  to  a  pro- 
fession. Before  the  Punic  wars  there  were 
thousands  of  Latin  freeholders  who  took  part 
in  politics  as  a  matter  of  course  and  divided  up 
the  duties  of  the  state.  We  read  of  aristocratic 
governing  classes  and  plebeian  "  consenters," 
each  with  its  own  machinery  of  expression, 
trending  through  compromise  to  union.  The 
situation  was  like  that  in  England  during  the 
nineteenth  century,  when  one  Reform  Bill 
after  another  brought  the  people  to  comparative 
uniformity.  Under  the  Empire,  however,  the 
expert  was  everything,  and  the  citizen  in 
general  a  pawn.  The  whole  world  had  poured 
into  Rome.  Wandering  threads  had  to  be 
drawn  together.  Political  action  was  in  the 
hands  of  a  few.  Consequently,  thought  had  no 
practical  outlet.  A  Corbulo  could  be  sent  to 
the  East;  a  Sejanus  could  tyrannize  at  Rome. 

[5] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

But  it  was  all  under  the  patronage  and  aegis  of 
empire.  In  such  an  era  the  philosophy  of 
government  would  be  speculatively  and  theo- 
retically bold;  but  it  could  not  function  unless 
it  was  assimilated  by  the  agencies  of  govern- 
ment. Hence  came  at  periodic  intervals 
insurrection  by  groups  and  revolt  by  indi- 
viduals. 

As  with  thought  and  statecraft,  so  with  style. 
The  Latin  language  was  born  in  simplicity  and 
nursed  in  facts.  It  recorded  triumphs,  recited 
chants,  or  argued  cases.  Its  wit  was  homely 
and  its  frills  were  all  Greek.  Cato  is  brief  and 
sinewy.  Plautus  is  as  homely  and  Roman  as 
his  Greek  models  allow  him  to  be.  Except  for 
satire,  the  types  of  literature  are  mostly  im- 
ported for  the  sake  of  cultural  apprenticeship 
among  a  people  who  must  imitate  before  they 
begin  to  create.  As  the  world,  however,  pours 
into  Italy,  poets  put  on  literary  plumage  and 
become  half  original;  orators  study  Athenian 
models  until  they  rival  their  forbears,  and 
Rhetoric  enters  upon  the  stage.  After  the 
masterpieces  of  the  Golden  Age  and  the  muz- 
zling of  political  expression,  it  was  hard  to  say 
anything  new;  therefore  one  must  say  some- 
thing striking.  Oratory  leaves  the  law-courts 
[6] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 
«  • 

for  the  lecture-hall,  poetry  refines  upon  subtle- 
ties, and  the  Roman  essay,  or  popular  diatribe, 
becomes  fashionable. 

The  world  was  thus  ready  for  an  interpre- 
ter, in  new  and  striking  terms,  of  this  Silver 
Age  cosmopolitanism.  And  it  found  such  an 
interpreter  in  the  person  of  Seneca  the 
Younger,  an  innovator  in  philosophy,  politics, 
and  literature. 

Seneca,  whose,  personality  has  always  been 
somewhat  of  a  puzzle,  was  born  about  4  B.C. 
in  that  mysterious  land  which  was  known  to 
the  Romans  as  a  nurse  of  hardy  and  artistic 
tribesmen  who  for  two  hundred  years,  until  the 
age  of  Augustus,  had  resisted  the  resources  of 
Rome  with  more  success  than  the  volatile  Gauls 
or  the  versatile  Greeks. 

"  As  some  grave  Tyrian  trader ,  from  the  sea, 
'Descried  at  sunrise  an  emerging  prow, 
And  saw  the  merry  Grecian  coaster  come, 
freighted  with  amber  grapes,  and  Chian  wine, 
Green  bursting  figs,  and  tunnies  steeped  in  brine, 
And  knew  the  intruders  on  his  ancient  home, — ■ 

The  young  light-hearted  masters  of  the  waves, — 
And  snatched  his  rudder,  and  shook  out  more  sail; 
And  day  and  night  held  on  indignantly 

[7] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

his  business  ventures,  Balbus  wrote  a  historical 
drama  entitled  Iter^ —  an  account  of  his  mission 
to  Pompey  in  49  b.c.  Business  and  romance 
went  hand  in  hand.  Mines,  vineyards,  olive- 
groves,  and  esparto  grass  were  to  make  the 
fortune  of  many  a  Roman. 

Corduba  (now  Cordova)  was  founded  as 
early  as  150  B.C.  It  earned  the  right  to  be  the 
capital  of  a  senatorial  province,  and  grew  into 
a  political  and  literary  centre,  especially  famous 
for  schools  of  rhetoric  as  well  as  for  its  alle- 
giance to  the  Republican  tradition  of  Pompey. 
Caesar  never  forgave  this,  but  Augustus  toler- 
ated and  utilized  it  for  the  purpose  of  solidify- 
ing his  conquests  among  the  wilder  tribes  of 
the  north  and  west.    From  this  city  sprang 

"The  learned  Seneca's  house 
That  is  thrice  to  be  numbered.'*  ^ 

Lucius  Annaeus  Seneca  the  Elder,  father  of 
the  philosopher  whom  this  book  discusses,  was 
a  manager  of  provincial  finances,  a  procurator 
of  the  Imperial  government,  whose  connections 
were  of  the  best  equestrian,  or  knightly,  tradi- 
tions and  whose  salary  may  have  reached 
300,000  sesterces  ($15,000).  We  do  not  know 
whether  he  was  an  importation  from  Rome,  or 

[10] 


AND    HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

later  Celtic  intermixtures.  In  the  center  of  this 
peninsula,  however,  lay  the  Turdetani  who  in- 
habited Baetica  (the  modern  Andalusia)  and 
whose  capital  was  Corduba,  the  birthplace  of 
Seneca.  They  had  the  highest  degree  of  civili- 
zation in  the  whole  province,  and  yet  they  can- 
not be  identified  with  certainty  as  either  Celtic 
or  Iberian. 

For  over  a  hundred  years  the  course  of 
empire  had  taken  its  way  westward  until,  in 
the  days  of  empire  proper,  Spain  became  a 
fixture  in  the  Roman  provincial  system.  Men 
of  the  Marco  Polo  type  had  travelled  thither, 
advertising  the  charms  of  Cadiz  or  the  fertile 
Lusitania  (now  Portugal)  "  where  flowers 
bloom  through  nine  months  of  the  year,  a 
bushel  of  wheat  costs  nine  obols,  a  sheep  two 
drachmae,  and  a  plough-ox  ten.'^  The  myths 
of  Hercules  and  Geryon,  of  Ulysses  and  the 
town  of  Olisipo  (Lisbon)  which  report  claimed 
that  he  had  founded,  are  early  echoes  of  this 
romantic  interest.  The  Spanish  skipper,  with 
his  heart  full  of  gallantry  and  his  pockets  full 
of  gold,  is  familiar  to  us  from  the  Odes  of 
Horace;  ^  and  the  clever  Balbus,  a  native  Span- 
iard and  agent  of  Julius  Caesar,  is  an  epitome 
of  this  progressive  nation.    In  addition  to  all 

[9] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

his  business  ventures,  Balbus  wrote  a  historical 
drama  entitled  Iter, —  an  account  of  his  mission 
to  Pompey  in  49  B.C.  Business  and  romance 
went  hand  in  hand.  Mines,  vineyards,  olive- 
groves,  and  esparto  grass  were  to  make  the 
fortune  of  many  a  Roman. 

Corduba  (now  Cordova)  was  founded  as 
early  as  150  b.c.  It  earned  the  right  to  be  the 
capital  of  a  senatorial  province,  and  grew  into 
a  political  and  literary  centre,  especially  famous 
for  schools  of  rhetoric  as  well  as  for  its  alle- 
giance to  the  Republican  tradition  of  Pompey. 
Caesar  never  forgave  this,  but  Augustus  toler- 
ated and  utilized  it  for  the  purpose  of  solidify- 
ing his  conquests  among  the  wilder  tribes  of 
the  north  and  west.    From  this  city  sprang 

"  The  learned  Seneca* s  house 
That  is  thrice  to  be  numbered."  ^ 

Lucius  Annaeus  Seneca  the  Elder,  father  of 
the  philosopher  whom  this  book  discusses,  was 
a  manager  of  provincial  finances,  a  procurator 
of  the  Imperial  government,  whose  connections 
were  of  the  best  equestrian,  or  knightly,  tradi- 
tions and  whose  salary  may  have  reached 
300,000  sesterces  ($15,000).  We  do  not  know 
whether  he  was  an  importation  from  Rome,  or 

[10] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

descended  from  early  Roman  settlers,  or  born 
of  an  intelligent  native  family.  His  title  to 
fame  is  a  book  of  rhetorical  memoirs,  dedicated 
to  his  three  sons,  although  he  himself  would 
doubtless  prefer  to  be  remembered  as  an  admin- 
istrator rather  than  as  an  Isaac  D 'Israeli  or 
a  scissors-and-paste  collector  of  oratorical  anec- 
dotes. He  was  a  strict  conservative,  unlike  his 
more  distinguished  son;  he  modelled  his  style 
upon  Cicero,  hated  philosophy  and  all  the 
strange  cults  which  knocked  at  the  gates  of 
the  Empire,  and  brought  up  his  family  like  a 
Roman  of  the  old  school.  His  wife  Helvia 
remains  in  the  background;  but  her  influence 
upon  the  younger  Seneca  was  profound,  and  he 
dedicated  to  her  one  of  the  noblest  tributes 
from  a  son  to  a  mother  in  literary  history.  She 
was  content  to  refrain  from  the  mad  rush  of 
social  Rome,  and  preferred  to  be  the  devoted 
mother  of  Gallio,  the  governor  of  Achaia, 
whose  dealings  with  St.  Paul  we  remember 
from  the  New  Testament,  of  Lucius  Annaeus 
the  philosopher,  and  of  Mela  (father  of  the 
poet  Lucan),  who  chose  to  follow  his  father's 
profession  and  amass  a  fortune  through  the 
usual  Roman  official  channels.  She  outlived 
her  husband  and  died  about  39  a.d. 

[II] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

Such  were  the  antecedents  of  Seneca;  they 
assist  us  in  our  attempt  to  account  for  his  blend 
of  the  millionaire  and  ascetic,  for  his  literary 
Catholicism,  and  for  his  attainment  of  the  high- 
est place  in  Rome  short  of  the  throne  by  means 
of  his  eloquence  and  his  Stoicism.  With  such 
a  background,  it  is  not  surprising  that  he  ap- 
pealed to  Rousseau  as  a  humanitarian,  to 
Calvin  as  a  guide  for  princes,  and  to  Christians 
as  a  literary  champion  of  new  ideals. 

About  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  era  the 
sons  of  the  elder  Seneca  were  brought  to  Rome 
to  be  educated  for  government  and  administra- 
tion. They  had  distinct  advantages:  they  were 
free  from  the  tarnished  glamour  of  senatorial 
rank,  and  yet  possessed  of  a  wealthy  and  re- 
spectable inheritance.  Lucius  began  his  train- 
ing under  the  care  of  a  devoted  aunt,  wife  of  the 
governor  of  Egypt,  a  woman  of  such  dignity 
that  even  the  loose  gossip  of  Alexandria  held 
its  tongue  in  her  honour.  As  he  grew  older  he 
visited  there  extensively;  for  the  uncle  was  re- 
tained in  his  office  for  sixteen  years  by  Tibe- 
rius, on  the  principle  that  a  consistent  policy 
was  necessary  in  a  part  of  the  Empire  that 
formed  a  critical  and  vital  aid  to  the  grain  sup- 
ply of  Rome.    His  aunt  nursed  him  through  a 

[12] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

dangerous  illness,  and  later  returned  to  Italy 
with  the  ashes  of  her  husband,  who  had  pre- 
sumably died  in  office.  The  observations  made 
by  Lucius  on  the  subject  of  death  and  its  proper 
defiance  are  thus  more  than  mere  Stoic 
commonplaces.  Such  visits  deepened  his 
practical  experience  also.  He  learned  at  first 
hand  the  provincial  theory  of  government  and 
the  management  of  finances  on  a  large  scale. 
And  in  this  period  he  produced  a  work  on  the 
geography  and  religion  of  Egypt,  as  well  as  a 
pamphlet  on  the  peoples  of  India;  for  Alexan- 
dria, the  connecting  link  between  East  and 
West,  was  the  clearing-house  of  such  re- 
searches. It  is  interesting  to  note  that  as  he 
began  with  geography  and  natural  history,  so 
he  ended  with  them,  publishing  many  years 
later  a  scientific  work  which  dwells  with  special 
emphasis  upon  the  flow  and  the  sources  of 
the  Nile. 

Through  all  these  early  days  Seneca  strug- 
gled continuously  with  ill  health.  Introspective 
by  nature,  he  became  still  more  so  for  this 
reason.  He  tells  us  that  he  leaned  towards 
Pythagorean  mysticism  and  several  of  the 
strange  contemporary  Eastern  cults,  and  that 
he  was  only  induced  to  throw  away  his  philo- 

[13] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

sophic  eccentricities  at  the  request  of  his  practi- 
cal and  matter-of-fact  father,  with  whom 
he  had  many  a  friendly  argument,  and 
whose  Life  he  composed  presumably  after  the 
year  39  a.d. 

He  remarks  naively,  apropos  of  his  chronic 
catarrh:  "I  often  entertained  the  impulse  of 
ending  my  life  then  and  there,  but  the  thought 
of  my  kind  old  father  "  (some  fifty  years  older 
than  himself)  "  kept  me  back.  For  I  reflected, 
not  how  bravely  I  had  the  power  to  die,  but  how 
little  power  he  had  to  bear  bravely  the  loss  of 
me."  Again:  ''  Someone  has  made  a  joke  about 
the  baldness  of  my  head,  the  weakness  of  my 
eyes,  the  thinness  of  my  legs,  the  shortness  of 
my  stature;  what  insult  is  there  in  telling  me 
what  everyone  sees?  "  He  was  subject  to 
asthma  throughout  his  life.  We  have  many 
accounts  of  his  plain  diet,  his  life-long  teeto- 
talism,  his  cold-water  baths,  and  his  daily 
"  road-work  "  to  overcome  physical  handicaps. 

But  his  young  manhood  was  a  happy  one. 
It  was  marked  by  genial  discussions  with  his 
father  on  the  vagaries  of  philosophy,  by  love  of 
country  life  at  the  various  villas  which  the 
family  owned,  congenial  association  with  his 
brilliant  and  popular  brother  Gallio  (to  whom 

[14] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

he  dedicated  several  of  his  works),  marriage 
and  children,^  and  a  triumphant  progress  in  the 
courts  of  law. 

It  is  to  be  assumed  that  Seneca  fulfilled  the 
usual  administrative  apprenticeship  by  holding 
a  curatorship  of  the  mint,  or  a  secretarial  posi- 
tion in  the  Department  of  Public  Works,  or  a 
magistracy  in  one  of  the  lesser  courts.  And 
then,  with  the  backing  of  his  aunt,  he  attained 
the  quaestorship,  an  office  under  the  treasury 
which  was  regarded  as  the  first  real  step  into 
political  prominence.  This  is  supposed  to 
have  taken  place  about  33  a.d.  Tiberius  seems 
to  have  been  on  good  terms  with  the  whole  fam- 
ily, because  of  his  attitude  toward  the  governor 
of  Egypt,  and  also  by  reason  of  the  elder 
Seneca's  earnest  desire  that  his  son  should  not 
incur  that  emperor's  displeasure  by  following 
the  foreign  worships  against  which  Tiberius 
legislated  in  the  year  19  a.d.  It  is  significant 
that  in  Seneca's  writings  Augustus  and  Tiberius 
are  treated  on  the  whole  with  respect,  while 
Caligula  and  Claudius  come  in  for  hatred  and 
ridicule.  Of  Nero  —  more,  later.  That  is  the 
puzzle. 

This  hatred  of  Caligula  perhaps  originated  in 
the  jealousy  of  the  mad  emperor,  who  attacked 

[IS] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

Seneca  after  a  brilliant  oratorical  effort,  sneered 
at  his  style,  called  it  "  sand  without  lime  "  and 
"  mere  school  declamation,"  and  would  have 
put  him  to  death  along  with  many  another 
promising  citizen  had  not  one  of  the  court  ladies 
diverted  him  by  remarking  that  the  young 
lawyer's  delicate  constitution  would  of  itself  do 
what  the  emperor  wished  to  do.  He  may  have 
been  thinking  of  this  episode  when  he  wrote 
to  his  friend  Lucilius  many  years  later: 
"  Disease  has  often  postponed  death,  and  a 
vision  of  dying  has  been  many  a  man's  sal- 
vation." 

Prosperity  was  thus  escorting  Seneca  along 
the  highroad  to  distinction.  Whether  he  en- 
tered the  Senate  under  Tiberius  is  doubtful ;  but 
it  is  entirely  possible  that  his  quaestorship  had 
qualified  him  therefor  immediately.  At  any 
rate  he  began  to  take  his  place  as  the  literary 
leader  of  society  and  the  spiritual  adviser  to  a 
cultivated  group  of  social  leaders.  Before  the 
death  of  Caligula  in  41  he  had  written  an  essay 
of  consolation  to  Marcia,  the  daughter  of  Cre- 
mutius  Cordus, —  one  of  those  heroes  on  the 
opposition  benches  to  whom  Tacitus,  the  his- 
torian, pays  respectful  homage.  And  about 
the  same  time  he  had  produced  his  famous 

[16] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

treatise  On  Anger,  which  may  be  assumed  to 
have  resulted  from  observation  of  this  vice  in 
the  habits  of  the  late  emperor.  Seneca,  as  a 
member  of  the  circle  to  which  the  princesses  of 
the  royal  house  belonged,  could  paint  a  realistic 
portrait  of  the  monster.  But,  ironically  enough, 
with  all  this  success  under  a  prince  who  had 
hated  him,  he  came  to  grief  under  the  next  em- 
peror, Claudius,  a  scholarly  and  legal  person 
with  whom  he  would  have  been  supposed  to 
stand  on  a  most  congenial  footing. 

Claudius  was  a  sort  of  Roman  James  the 
First.  He  was  a  man  of  encyclopaedic  learning, 
of  literary  taste,  and  of  much  experience  in 
jurisprudence,  antiquities,  art,  history,  and 
linguistics.  It  was  the  Empress  Messalina, 
whose  cruel  and  beautiful  face  now  looks  ap- 
propriately down  in  marble  upon  visitors  to 
the  Capitoline  Museum,  to  whom  Seneca's  dis- 
grace may  be  ascribed.  She  hated  the  sisters 
of  the  late  Caligula  and  the  penetrating  intellect 
of  Seneca,  who  had  given  them  his  sympathy. 
The  reason  given  at  court  was  a  too  great  inti- 
macy between  the  Princess  Julia  and  the  rising 
statesman,  although  the  gossiping  Suetonius 
declares  that  the  charge  was  vague  and  that  no 
opportunity  of  defence  was  given.     The  fact 

[17] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

that  thirty-five  senators  and  three  hundred 
knights  were  executed  under  Claudius  is  also  a 
proof  of  frequent  injustice. 

At  all  events,  the  penalty  was  relegatio,  or 
banishment,  with  ensuing  confiscation  of  half  a 
man's  property.  The  destination  was  the 
barren  island  of  Corsica,  whitewashed  by 
" Jemmy "  Boswell *  as  "a  most  agreeable 
island  situated  in  the  Mediterranean,"  correctly 
sketched  without  exaggeration  by  Merimee  in 
Colomba  as  a  shrub-grown  land  of  sandy  soil 
and  romantic  associations,  and  anathematized 
in  Seneca's  first  Epigram: 

"  Island  of  dread,  when  summer^s  heats  begin, 
More  savage  when  the  Dog-star  shows  his  teeth  t 
Spare  thou  the  banished, —  rather  spare  thou  those 
Within  the  tomb;  and  let  thy  earth  lie  light 
Upon  the  ashes  of  the  living  dead!  " 

Here  he  spent  eight  years,  from  his  forty- 
fifth  to  his  fifty-third.  We  are  not  enlightened 
with  regard  to  the  exile's  activities.  We  only 
know  that  a  mouldering  mass  of  ruins  is  still 
called  "  Seneca's  tower,"  and  that  in  Corsica 
he  composed  the  tragedies  which  furnished  the 
material  for  much  of  French  drama  and  so  un- 
mistakably developed  the  Elizabethan  stage. 
[i8] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

We  note  three  epochs  in  his  exile  literature 
which  can  be  clearly  marked  out:  in  the  first 
he  takes  the  attitude  of  heroic  and  philosophic 
resignation,  with  a  work  on  Providence^  ad- 
dressed to  his  friend  Lucilius;  another  of  the 
same  sort  on  The  Steadfastness  of  the  Sage, 
dedicated  to  Serenus;  and  an  essay  of  consola- 
tion to  his  mother,  Helvia,  —  manly  in  spite  of 
its  occasional  egoism.  The  second  stage  is  re- 
vealed in  a  cringing  letter  to  the  powerful 
Polybius,  one  of  the  Emperor's  rich  freedmen 
secretaries.  The  third  is  one  of  quiet  despair, 
unrecorded  in  actual  output  but  reflected  in  his 
later  works.  His  moods  therefore  ran  the 
gamut  peculiar  to  the  sensitive  temperament  of 
one  who  saw  his  ambitions  destroyed  and  his 
opportunities  annihilated. 

We  must  remember,  however,  that  the  gen- 
eral public  felt  kindly  disposed  toward  Seneca 
even  through  these  days  of  exile.  When 
Fortune,  whom  the  philosopher  so  often  scorns 
in  his  writings,  had  come  to  his  assistance  in 
the  most  unexpected  way,  his  restoration  to 
grace  was  a  popular  action.  In  the  year  49, 
when  Messalina  was  removed  from  the  scene, 
and  the  youthful  Domitius,  son  of  Agrippina 
and  later  to  be  the  Emperor  Nero,  was  in  need 

[19] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

of  a  tutor,  Seneca  was  welcomed  back  to  Rome, 
honoured  with  public  office,  and  given  the  privi- 
leges of  such  responsibility.  Tacitus,  as  usual, 
says  much  in  a  few  words:  "  Agrippina  ob- 
tained withdrawal  from  exile  for  Annaeus 
Seneca,  and  at  the  same  time  got  him  the  prae- 
torship,  thinking  that  it  would  be  a  popular 
choice  for  two  reasons,  because  of  his  reputa- 
tion as  a  writer  and  for  the  sake  of  having  her 
fledgling  son  grow  up  under  such  a  training." 
So  the  barren  Corsica  was  left  behind,  to  appear 
before  his  eyes  in  the  future  only  as  a  mirage 
or  a  memory,  and  he  returned  to  the  honours 
and  the  dangers  of  the  imperial  city.  Several 
of  his  friends  had  been  especially  loyal  to  him: 
Annaeus  Serenus,  to  whom  were  dedicated  the 
essays  On  Steadfastness,  On  Leisure,  and  On 
Peace  of  Mind;  Caesonius  Maximus,  in  whose 
company  it  is  likely  he  was  dining  when  the 
centurion  brought  him  the  fateful  message  in 
the  year  65;  and  Lucilius,  his  close  companion 
and  regular  correspondent,  to  whom  we  owe 
the  existence  of  the  Epistles  and  the  work 
On  Providence  and  the  Natural  History. 
Gallio,  with  whom  he  conducted  an  extensive 
correspondence  that  was  preserved  after  his 
death,  and  to  whom  he  dedicated  the  essay  On 
[20] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

the  Happy  Life,  never  forsook  him,  nor  did 
many  of  his  friends,  to  whom  he  collectively 
utters  frequent  words  of  appreciation.  It  is 
much  that  Seneca  should  put  these  words  into 
the  mouth  of  Lucilius  when  reminiscing  over 
the  horrors  of  former  days:  "  I  risked  my  head 
for  my  loyalty.  No  word  was  wrung  from  me 
that  I  could  not  utter  with  a  clear  conscience. 
All  my  fears  were  for  my  friends,  none  for  my- 
self, except  the  fear  of  not  proving  a  true 
friend."  It  speaks  much  for  one  who  could  re- 
tain the  affection  of  such  a  coterie  during  eight 
years  of  official  disgrace;  and  to  this  disposition 
can  be  attributed  his  (now  lost)  essay  On  the 
Maintenance  of  Friendship. 

Germanicus,  striving  manfully  to  control 
mutineers  in  Germany  and  to  forge  his  way  to 
the  mouth  of  the  Elbe,  could  scarcely  have 
foretold  the  criminal  and  distorted  shapes  into 
which  his  descendants  would  turn.  His 
daughter,  Agrippina,  whose  mother  had  for 
years  followed  her  husband's  war  chariot  and 
had  borne  him  nine  children,  was  unlucky 
enough  to  wed  Domitius  Ahenobarbus,  the 
roughest  and  wildest  beast  of  the  Roman  aris- 
tocracy. To  this  second  "  Ulysses  in  petti- 
coats," mother  of  Nero,  her  uncle  Claudius  was 

[21] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

attracted;  after  the  removal  of  Messalina  he 
sheepishly  announced  to  the  Senate  his  inten- 
tion to  marry  her.  Thus  it  was  that  Britan- 
nicus,  son  of  Claudius  and  Messalina,  soon 
dropped  from  sight,  and  Nero  became  heir 
presumptive,  backed  and  fostered  by  his 
mother's  forceful  wiles.  Nero  was  twelve 
years  of  age  in  49, —  ready  for  lessons  in 
government.  In  this  way  Seneca,  a  former 
friend  of  the  children  of  Germanicus,  found 
himself  the  guardian  of  that  hero's  grandson 
in  all  matters  of  education  and  statecraft.  The 
highest  offices  were  entrusted  to  Seneca  in 
rapid  succession;  money  flowed  into  his  purse 
through  imperial  donations  and  wise  invest- 
ments. He  wrote  speeches  from  and  for  the 
throne,  in  a  style  which  appealed  to  Roman 
ears.  Among  his  masterpieces  may  be  counted 
the  De  Clementia,  a  companion  piece  to  the 
De  Beneficils,  and  a  model  of  wise  counsel 
in  moderate  kingship  which  Nero  might  have 
followed  more  faithfully  and  with  better  re- 
sults. Had  Nero  listened  to  his  guidance  he 
might  have  separated  the  private  and  the  public 
rights  of  an  emperor  with  more  justice,  and 
have  restored  some  of  the  valuable  attributes 
of  the  republican  Senate  by  sundering  its  pre- 
[22] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

rogatives  from  those  of  the  prince  and  giving 
it  a  more  legitimate  use  of  authority. 

By  the  year  60,  therefore,  Seneca  was,  in  the 
words  of  the  Elder  Pliny,  "  the  leader  in  letters 
and  the  leader  in  government."  He  interpreted 
the  laws  and  administered  the  state,  wisely 
leaving  military  matters  to  his  trusted  friend 
Burrus,  the  prefect  of  the  Praetorian  Guard. 
And  for  the  years  from  55  to  60  Rome  was 
governed  as  she  had  seldom  been  governed  be- 
fore,—  passing  the  inspection  of  a  rigid  critic, 
the  Emperor  Trajan,  who  declared  that  the 
Quinquennium  Neronis  was  the  ideal  epoch  of 
Roman  history.  And  this  was  true ;  for  during 
that  time  Nero  followed  the  counsel  of  these 
two  advisers. 

Nero  boasted  that  in  the  year  62  he  had 
saved  the  state  sixty  million  sesterces  ($3,000,- 
000).  But  he  might  have  given  credit  where 
credit  was  due.  Seneca  had  put  the  Treasury 
heads  on  a  three-year  instead  of  a  one-year 
basis,  thus  saving  experimentation  in  favor  of 
experience.  Tacitus  tells  us  that  economy  was 
his  watch- word.  He  reduced  the  percentage 
given  to  the  prosecutors  of  illegal  wills;  he 
decreed  in  58  a  permanent  court  for  the  investi- 
gation of  graft  in  provincial  tax-raising,  instead 

[23] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

of  allowing  personal  lawsuits  and  the  throat- 
cutting  of  rival  parties;  he  refused  to  condemn 
unheard  freedmen  who  were  guilty  of  "  in- 
gratitude "  toward  their  former  masters.  There 
were  no  treason  cases  of  the  old  sort  during 
his  ministry,  and  he  was  probably  instrumental 
in  sending  the  great  general  Corbulo  to  the 
East.  Moreover,  in  handling  the  energetic 
Agrippina,  he  seems  to  have  displayed  the 
greatest  finesse.  When  the  Armenian  ambassa- 
dors were  about  to  present  their  credentials  and 
Agrippina  had  stepped  forward  to  receive  them, 
a  quick  whisper  from  Seneca  to  Nero  post- 
poned Jier  presumptuous  action  and  put  off  the 
audience.  Seneca  wrote  Nero's  first,  and 
probably  many  subsequent  speeches  from  the 
throne.  When  Nero  wished  to  discharge  the 
honest  and  faithful  Burrus  for  not  consenting 
to  the  murder  of  Nero's  mother,  Seneca  came 
to  the  rescue  by  prompting  Burrus  to  declare 
that  he  would  execute  her  provided  the  treason 
should  be  fully  proved  at  a  legal  trial  and  that 
any  other  conspirators  should  suffer  the  same 
penalty.  There  was  flattery,  and  there  were 
sharp  corners  to  turn;  but  there  was  genius  at 
the  wheel  of  the  Roman  state,  keeping  down  the 
tendency  to  crime  and  cruelty  which  forever 

[24] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

threatened  in  the  breast  of  the  young  tiger-cub 
on  the  throne.  Seneca  knew  well  enough  that 
a  one-man  government  had  its  perils,  and  that 
a  return  to  the  republican  system  was  im- 
possible. The  wonder  is,  not  how  he  came 
to  the  end  of  the  experiment  in  philosopher- 
kingship  so  soon,  but  how  he  managed  to  keep 
it  in  running  order  so  long.  For,  as  Aristotle 
remarks  in  several  passages  of  his  Politics, 
it  is  only  in  the  ideal  or  perfect  state  that  the 
virtues  of  the  good  citizen  and  the  good  man 
are  identical. 

But  the  task  of  this  ministre  malgre  lui  was 
very  uphill  work.  Flattery  was  often  resorted 
to:  when  a  comet  of  unusual  significance  dis- 
played itself,  Seneca  heralded  it  as  of  good 
omen,  "  redeeming  comets  from  their  bad  char- 
acter "  because  it  appeared  during  the  reign 
of  Nero.  The  Emperor  was  cajoled  into  virtue, 
or  rather  out  of  vice,  by  means  known  to  the 
skilful  counsellor.  And  the  grind  of  it  all  was 
admitted  in  the  last  book  of  Seneca,  where  he 
says:  '^  Vice  can  be  acquired  even  without  a 
tutor."  To  what  else  than  his  attempts  to  keep 
Nero's  crooked  character  straight  are  to  be  as- 
cribed the  ultimate  disfavour  and  downfall  of 
Nero's  guardian? 

[25] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

The  death  of  Burrus  in  62  removed  Seneca's 
chief  aid  to  good  government.  At  this  period 
begins  the  process  to  which  Pliny  alludes  when 
he  tells  us  that  Seneca's  power  had  grown  to 
such  an  extent  that  it  came  crashing  down 
upon  him.  How  far  the  two  leaders  had  been 
consulted  in  Agrippina's  murder  can  never  be 
clearly  known;  but  an  honest  look  through 
history  reveals  them  as  at  least  not  forbidding 
or  protesting  against  the  ultimate  deed.  Tigel- 
linus  had  stepped  upon  the  stage,  aided  and 
abetted  by  Poppaea,  the  notorious  winner  of 
Nero's  heart  and  the  prime  cause  of  Agrip- 
pina's end.  Seneca  saw  at  this  time  that  he 
could  do  no  more,  and  begged  for  the  privilege 
of  retiring  into  private  life,  in  order  to  travel, 
to  compose  his  Natural  History,  and  to  com- 
plete the  Epistles,  but  Nero  kept  him  dangling 
in  a  state  of  doubt.  Finally  came  the  conspir- 
acy of  Piso,  that  indolent,  popular,  and  demo- 
cratic noble  whom  many  of  Nero's  enemies 
wished  to  elevate  to  the  purple, —  a  conspiracy 
in  which  all  the  Seneca  brothers  were  supposed 
to  be  implicated, —  and  the  last  days  of  our 
philosopher,  as  sketched  in  the  immortal 
description  of  Tacitus:  ° 

"  A   centurion    was    sent    to    announce    to 

[26] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Seneca  that  his  last  hour  was  come.  Seneca, 
undismayed,  asked  for  his  will;  but  this  the 
centurion  refused.  Then  turning  to  his  friends 
he  called  them  to  witness  that  ^  Being  forbidden 
to  requite  them  for  their  services,  he  was  leav- 
ing to  them  the  sole,  and  yet  the  noblest  pos- 
session that  remained  to  him :  the  pattern  of  his 
life.  If  they  bore  that  in  mind,  they  would  win 
for  themselves  a  name  for  virtue  as  the  reward 
of  their  devoted  friendship.'  At  one  moment  he 
would  check  their  tears  with  conversation;  at 
another  he  would  brace  up  their  courage  by 
high-strung  language  of  rebuke,  asking  — 
'  Where  was  now  their  philosophy? '  .  .  . 
'  To  whom  was  Nero's  cruelty  unknown?  What 
was  left  for  one  who  had  murdered  his  mother 
and  his  brother  but  to  slay  his  guardian  and 
teacher  also? '  .  .  .  His  wife  announced 
her  resolve  to  die  with  him.  Seneca  would  not 
thwart  her  noble  ambition;  and  he  loved  her  too 
dearly  to  expose  her  to  insult  after  he  was  gone. 
.  .  .  ^  Let  us  both  share  the  fortitude  in  thus 
nobly  dying;  but  thine  shall  be  the  noblest 
end.'  ...  A  single  incision  with  the  knife 
opened  the  arm  of  each.  .  .  .  Worn  out 
at  last  by  the  pain,  and  fearing  to  break 
down    his    wife's    courage    by   his    suffering, 

[27] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

or  to  lose  his  own  self-command  at  the  sight  of 
hers,  he  begged  her  to  move  into  another  cham- 
ber. But  even  in  his  last  moments  his  elo- 
quence did  not  fail.  He  called  his  secretaries 
to  his  side  and  dictated  to  them  many  things 
which  being  published  in  his  own  words  I  deem 
it  needless  to  reproduce.  .  .  .  Meanwhile 
Seneca,  in  the  agonies  of  a  slow  and  lingering 
death,  implored  Statius  Annaeus,  his  tried 
and  trusted  friend  and  physician,  to  pro- 
dupe  a  poison  with  which  he  had  long  provided 
himself,  being  the  same  as  that  used  for  public 
executions  at  Athens.  The  draught  was 
brought,  but  the  limbs  were  too  cold,  the  body 
too  numb,  to  let  the  poison  act.  At  last,  he 
was  put  into  a  warm  bath,  and  as  he  sprinkled 
the  slaves  about  him  he  added :  *  This  libation 
is  to  Jupiter  the  Liberator!  '  He  was  then 
carried  into  the  hot  vapor  bath,  and  perished 
by  suffocation.  His  body  was  burnt  without 
any  funeral  ceremony,  in  accordance  with  in- 
structions about  his  end  which  he  had  inserted 
in  his  will  in  the  heyday  of  his  wealth  and 
power.  " 

Thus  did  Seneca  win  release.  It  had  been 
with  conviction  that  he  wrote,  shortly  before,  to 
a  friend  who  was  more  independently  situated: 

[28] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

"  You  have  escaped  the  vices  of  the  soul,  the 
hypocrite's  brow,  the  flatterer's  speech  fash- 
ioned to  serve  another's  will,  the  dissembler's 
heart,  the  miser's  spirit,  which  robs  all  but  yet 
mortifies  itself." 

In  April  of  the  year  65  ended  the  career  of 
one  who  made  a  brave  attempt  to  join  a  theory 
of  life  with  a  practice  of  life.  How  successful 
the  attempt  was  we  shall  never  completely 
know;  the  pictures  of  the  period  are  boldly 
drawn  and  usually  with  prejudice.  We  are  pre- 
sented on  the  one  side  with  heroes  like  Thrasea 
and  the  school  of  Cato;  upon  the  other  is  all 
the  scandal  which  is  popularly  associated  with 
Claudius  and  Nero.  Our  evidence  from  the 
early  Empire  is  deficient  and  defective  because 
men  no  longer  talked  facts  as  they  did  in 
Cicero's  day;  they  upheld  causes,  or  defended 
policies,  or  made  language  the  veil  for  emotions 
which  used  to  be  expressed  more  obviously. 
Tacitus,  Dio,  Suetonius,^ — keen  painters  all, 
but  none  of  them  contemporaries  of  the  Nero 
epoch, —  have  left  us  a  vivid  picture.  But  we 
are  compelled  to  draw  our  own  conclusions.  It 
is  reasonable  to  believe  that  in  this  Spanish  re- 
gent of  the  Roman  world  we  have  an  historic 
figure, —  compounded  of  business  ability,  keen 

[29] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

statecraft,  brilliant  style  and  moving  mind. 
Later  Roman  emperors  respected  him  because 
of  his  reforms  in  administration;  a  Bossuet 
could  quarry  from  his  works  in  order  to  impress 
France  with  a  steadier  court-philosophy; 
Petrarch  could  look  .upon  his  letters  as  a  basis 
for  humanistic  prose;  and  Emerson,  as  we  have 
seen,  could  class  him  as  one  of  the  world's  most 
inspiring  masters  of  thought. 


[30] 


II.    SENECA:   HIS    INFLUENCE 
UPON   PAGAN   ROME 

MR.  FERRERO  has  frequently  pointed 
out  the  resemblance  between  the 
early  Roman  Empire  and  the 
United  States  of  to-day.  He  has  shown  how 
their  finance,  commerce,  public  works,  public 
opinion,  and,  along  certain  lines,  government, 
bear  a  similar  relation  to  one  another,  and  to 
the  community  at  large.  Society  was  cosmo- 
politan and  yet  uniform;  opinion  was  more  or 
less  traditional.  We  shall  see  that  Seneca  ran 
contrary  to,  or  ahead  of,  current  ideas  in  his 
philosophy,  in  his  style,  and  in  his  view  of  the 
state, —  that  he  was  a  popular  figure  in  these 
activities  and  yet  provoked  opposition  among 
those  who  accepted  the  old  order  as  worth  con- 
tinuing. Hence  at  first  he  was  a  sort  of  east 
wind  among  the  sluggish  thinkers  of  his  time. 
But  he  knew  his  Rome  better  than  most  native- 
bom  Romans  knew  her.  He  took  the  ency- 
clopaedic, the  eclectic  view.  He  felt  the  pulse 
of  coming  ages  better  than  court  rhetoricians 

[31] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

(though  he  was  one  himself),  better  than  his- 
torians, better  than  the  conservatives  of  his 
day. 

Opinions  regarding  the  genius  of  Seneca  vary 
from  the  outset.  One  of  his  enemies,  whom 
he  had  punished  for  violating  the  rule  that  a 
lawyer  should  not  plead  cases  for  a  cash  con- 
sideration, called  him  "  A  dilettante,  one  who 
satisfies  the  crude  minds  of  our  youth,  and  who 
envies  those  who  keep  the  good  old  eloquence 
alive  for  the  purpose  of  defending  Roman 
citizens !  "  The  mad  emperor  Caligula  accused 
him  of  producing  "  mere  sophomoric  exercises  " 
and  of  developing  a  style  that  was  "  sand  with- 
out lime."  But  in  the  very  passage  where 
Suetonius  quotes  these  sallies,  he  speaks  of 
Seneca  as  "  all  the  rage  in  those  days,"  and 
Columella,  the  writer  on  farming,  calls  him 
the  leading  vine-grower  of  Italy  and  a  man  of 
brilliant  intellect.  Seneca  is  known  to  the 
satirist  Juvenal,  who  speaks  of  him  three  times 
with  approval,  and  to  Ausonius,  three  hundred 
years  after,  as  "  the  multi-millionaire."  To 
the  emperor  Trajan  he  is  an  administrator  of 
great  ability.  But  it  took  two  hundred  years 
for  him  to  stand  forth  as  a  "  friend  and  aider 
of  those  who  would  live  in  the  spirit." 
[32] 


AND    HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Then,  as  now,  the  literary  world  and  the 
business  world  were  far  apart.  Literature  was 
in  the  hands  of  specialists,  and  the  general 
public,  especially  in  the  age  of  Tiberius,  was 
mentally  starved.  "  After  the  time  of  Augus- 
tus," says  Fronto,  the  associate  and  courtier 
of  Marcus  Aurelius  one  hundred  years  later, 
"  ideas  were  threadbare  and  mouldy.  And  the 
emperors  from  Tiberius  to  Vespasian  were  as 
much  ashamed  of  the  spoken  and  written  word 
as  they  were  disgusted  with  morals  and  sorry 
for  crimes."  Something  novel  was  necessary, 
and  it  was  found  in  the  development  of  the 
elocutio  novella, —  the  Euphuism  of  Rome, — 
which  began  at  this  time  to  grow,  and  which 
burgeoned  to  its  full  bloom  in  the  period  of  the 
Antonines.  Seneca  adapted  the  language  of  the 
business  world  to  the  artificial  style  of  the 
scholar  and  man  of  letters. 

It  was  exactly  this  habit  to  which  three  of  his 
critics  objected.  One  was  a  college  professor, 
one  an  antiquary,  and  one  a  courtier, —  all  of 
them  professionals,  so  to  speak.  Seneca  was 
an  amateur. 

Quintilian  the  professor,  who  about  the  year 
72  A.D.  had  been  formally  established  by  the 
emperor  Vespasian  head  of  rhetorical  schools 

[33] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

of  Rome,  shook  his  head  sadly  over  Seneca's 
style.  He  seems  to  have  felt  the  same  concern 
regarding  the  danger  of  this  influence  upon  the 
pens  and  minds  of  Roman  youths  that  was  felt 
seventy  years  ago  by  the  cautious  antagonists 
of  Carlyle  in  England  and  America.  He  feared 
the  New  Style,  and  he  clung  to  Cicero,  just  as 
the  elder  Seneca  had  clung  some  years  before. 
But  for  both  men  it  was  a  losing  game;  the 
innovator  was  to  have  his  way  for  better  or 
for  worse.  Theoretical  oratory,  with  its 
"point "  and  epigram  and  mechanical  skill,  had 
come  to  stay.  According  to  Quintilian's  norm, 
therefore,  we  note  his  protest:  "  Seneca  had 
many  good  qualities,  ...  an  easy  flowing  wit, 
plenty  of  industry,  and  a  large  stock  of  infor- 
mation. ...  In  his  philosophy  he  was  not 
exhaustive,  but  he  was  a  strong  champion 
against  vice.  He  has  many  noble  sayings, 
and  much  that  deserves  reading  for  the  sake  of 
character-development.  But,  as  I  said,  there 
are  many  ruinous  elements  in  his  style,  because 
of  his  inclination  to  indulge  in  tricks.  .  .  . 
By  not  being  too  fond  of  his  own  idea,  by 
refraining  from  impairing  the  solidity  of  his 
subject-matter  with  over-refined  subtleties,  he 
might  have  won  approval  in  the  opinion  of  the 

[34] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

learned  as  well  as  through  his  popularity  with 
the  younger  element.  The  well-trained  may 
read  him,  if  only  for  the  purpose  of  applying 
the  critical  faculty.  .  .  .  Our  student  should, 
however,  pick  and  choose  when  reading  Seneca, 
as  I  wish  Seneca  himself  had  done.  For  a 
nature  that  could  get  what  it  wished  was  worthy 
of  wishing  for  better  things." 

Evidently  a  new  and  perhaps  a  dangerous 
star  had  swum  into  the  Roman  ken, —  a  sub- 
ject of  much  discussion.  We  think  not  only 
of  Carlyle  above-mentioned,  but  of  Macaulay, 
who  stamped  the  review  and  the  essay  with  a 
new  combination  of  tricks  and  turns,  force 
and  dignity.  Quintilian  is  fair  to  Seneca  the 
man,  but  to  the  writer  he  shows  himself  a 
ribboned  academician,  ignoring  the  popular 
currents  and  striving  for  standards  of  old  time. 
He  forgot  that  in  an  age  when  the  only  piece 
of  work  rewarded  by  a  certain  emperor  was 
a  banquet-dialogue  between  a  mushroom,  a 
reed-bird,  and  an  oyster,  an  author  who  hoped 
to  gain  a  hearing  must  devise  something  strik- 
ing. And  such  was  the  case  in  the  reign  of 
Tiberius,  when  Seneca  began  to  write.  Struggle 
as  the  Conservatives  might,  the  Ciceronian 
norm  was  no  more  to  be  revived  in  Roman 

[35] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

literary  history.  Thus  from  the  unoriginal 
sameness  of  the  Tiberian  age  emerged  Seneca 
the  innovator,  the  early  advocate  of  a  Silver 
Latin  style. 

Winning  a  prominent  position  as  lawyer  and 
orator  during  the  reign  of  Caligula,  he  had 
cast  about  for  a  medium  in  which  his  message 
to  society  might  be  most  effective.  After  ex- 
perimenting with  such  topics  as  De  Supersti- 
tione,  De  Matrimonio,  and  similar  subjects  in 
which  learning  was  popularized  to  suit  the 
cultivated  people  of  Rome,  he  had  found  his 
medium  in  a  modification  of  the  Diatribe.  In 
his  hands  this  became  the  popular  Essay,  and 
is  the  first  real  and  consistent  example  of  that 
which  in  English  literature  we  denominate 
Essay.  The  Diatribe,  later  to  become  fash- 
ionable in  the  hands  of  show-speakers  like  Dio 
of  the  Golden  Mouth,  satisfied  what  we  might 
call  the  "  University  Extension  '^  element  in 
the  Roman  world.  It  was  partly  historical  dis- 
course, partly  literary  display,  and  partly  ora- 
tory of  the  fictitious  court-room  t5^e  which 
was  so  popular  after  free  speech  had  been 
muzzled.  The  study  of  this  question-answer 
t5^e  of  literature,  broadly  speaking,  was  the 
college  training  of  every  young  Roman;  and 

[36] 


AND     HIS    MODERN     MESSAGE 

a  glance  at  the  Memoirs  of  Seneca's  father 
will  show  us  what  an  array  of  stylistic  arti- 
ficiality was  spread  before  the  future  citizen. 
St.  Paul  himself,  with  his  convincing  presenta- 
tion of  doctrine  and  dogma,  aptly  illustrated 
and  armed  with  answers  to  all  possible  ques- 
tions, may  be  described  as  a  master  of  Diatribe. 
It  is  this  very  type  that  Seneca  loosened  into 
Essay.  The  medium  which  did  not  demand  the 
close  thought  or  the  detailed  knowledge  re- 
quired by  philosophy  or  technical  treatises,  and 
yet  kept  the  reader  on  the  qui  vive,  exactly 
suited  the  nervous,  bored,  and  clever  Roman 
world.  We  have  just  seen  what  Quintilian 
thought  of  the  effect  of  these  popular  essays 
upon  contemporary  youth.  As  the  college 
student  spent  his  time  in  debating  legal  casuis- 
tries, so  Seneca  took  over  the  debate-motif 
into  philosophy,  seasoning  it  with  current 
problems  and  bits  of  Stoicism.  Why  do  good 
men  suffer  evil  ij  there  is  a  just  Providence?- 
What  is  the  Happy  Life?  The  True  Leisure. 
Anger  and  how  to  Control  it.  On  Cures  for  III 
Fortune.  On  the  Shortness  of  Life.  These  and 
kindred  discussions  are  Essays,  a  new  type  to 
the  Roman,  who  used  to  do  his  thinking  along 
such  lines  in  poetry,  or  treatises,  or  autobiog- 

[37] 


s'eneca'  the  philosopher 

raphy,  or  fragmentarily  in  letters  to  his  friends. 
In  this  field  Seneca  is  therefore  a  pioneer  who 
"  combined  all  moods,  inventing  one." 

The  Epistles  of  Seneca  are  the  high-water 
mark  of  this  subjective  essay.  They  lead  the 
way  for  Medieval  Latin  declarations  of  liter- 
ary independence,  catching  some  of  the  Ori- 
ental individualism  which  marks  the  man  with 
a  message.  They  discard  the  Greek  communal 
element  and  make  toward  self-revelation,  just 
as  Montaigne  many  years  later  discarded  pre- 
vious types  and  spoke  as  a  definite  personality. 
They  develop  themselves  round  a  central  and 
subjective  mood, —  contrary  to  the  diary-fash- 
ion of  Cicero's  correspondence  which  is  always 
concrete  and,  in  spite  of  Cicero's  egotism,  full 
of  objective  comment,  like  Evelyn  and  Walpole. 
And  precisely  the  reason  why  certain  of  his 
later  critics  objected  to  him  is  because  he  sacri- 
ficed everything  to  the  point  of  the  idea  under 
discussion,  becoming,  unlike  his  Roman  prede- 
cessors, abstract  rather  than  concrete. 

One  example  will  suffice.  Cicero  skips  from 
general  matters  to  objective  affairs:  "  In  your 
letter  you  ask  whether  I  take  more  pleasure  in 
hills  and  a  view  or  a  walk  by  the  silver  sea. 
.    .    .  Upon  my  word,  both  are  so  beautiful 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

that  I  doubt  which  to  prefer."  And  then  comes 
a  discussion  of  Brutus,  salted  down  with 
Homeric  quotations.  All  is  "  rambly  "  and  de- 
lightful,—  the  disjecta  membra  of  a  statesman's 
mind.  Seneca's  attack  is  so  very  different: 
"  I  am  resting  at  the  country  house  which  once 
belonged  to  Scipio  Africanus  himself;  and  I 
write  to  you  after  doing  reverence  to  his  spirit, 
at  an  altar  which  I  am  inclined  to  think  is 
his  tomb.  .  .  .  What  can  I  do  but  admire 
his  magnanimity?  ...  I  have  inspected  the 
house  ...  the  well  ...  the  bath.  .  .  . 
But  who  in  these  days  could  bear  to  bathe  in 
such  humble  fashion?  We  think  ourselves  poor 
and  mean  if  our  walls  are  not  resplendent. 
.  .  .  How  some  persons  nowadays  condemn 
Scipio  as  a  boor  because  he  did  not  let  daylight 
into  the  bath  through  wide  windows.  .  .  . 
'  Poor  fool,'  they  say,  ^  he  did  not  know  how  to 
live!  '.  .  .  I  learned  a  valuable  lesson  from 
the  present  owner  of  this  villa,  that  a  tree  can 
be  transplanted,  no  matter  how  far  gone  in 
years."  The  whole  essay  of  Seneca  (Bacon 
called  all  the  Epistles  '^  Essaies ")  proceeds 
from  concrete  to  abstract  and  plays  about  one 
single  point,  the  vigor,  simplicity,  and  agri- 
cultural interests  of  a  t5^ical  early  Roman, 

[39] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

just  as  Charles  Lamb  is  uniform  when  he  de- 
scribes "  Mackery  End  in  Hertfordshire  "  or 
as  Stevenson  is  uniform  when  he  rambles  by  a 
French  river  or  muses  in  a  portrait-gallery  over 
ruddy-faced  Scotch  admirals. 

In  short,  Seneca  was  a  puzzle  to  most  of  his 
contemporaries.  He  wrote  a  prose  essay  which 
could  not  be  identified  with  any  contemporary 
type  of  literature;  it  was  not  normal  Stoicism, 
like  the  work  of  Epictetus;  it  was  not  the 
Lamb-like  style  soon  to  be  exemplified  .in  the 
Younger  Pliny;  it  was  not  rhetoric  par  excel- 
lence, as  in  the  treatises  of  his  father;  nor  was 
it  the  trenchant  description  of  Cicero.  And  yet 
it  can  be  proved,  by  a  sort  of  paradox,  that  this 
very  mixing  of  types,  this  habit  of  scorning  the 
"  liturgical "  form,  has  resulted  in  the  catho- 
licity of  his  appeal  to  so  many  thinkers  in  sub- 
sequent ages. 

That  Seneca  had  an  eye  to  his  contempo- 
raries rather  than  to  his  predecessors  is  proved 
by  the  remarks  of  Aulus  Gellius,  an  antiqua- 
rian of  the  second  century.  Gellius  was  a  sort 
of  Isaac  D 'Israeli,  who  gathered  into  his  ran- 
dom essays  {Nights  in  Athens)  3.  scramble  of 
interesting  gossip  and  history  which  throws 
much  light  on  the  customs  of  the  period. 
[40] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

People  had  begun  again  to  archaize,  to  hark 
back  to  ancient  Rome  for  their  models;  and 
Gellius  takes  umbrage  at  the  patronizing  re- 
marks of  Seneca  on  Cicero,  Ennius,  and  Virgil: 
"  I  need  not  judge  him  in  general,  but  we  really 
need  to  consider  what  he  says  about  these 
three  authors  ...  he  picks  out  some  verses 
by  Ennius  and  says  of  them:  ^  I  am  surprised 
that  men  of  the  greatest  eloquence,  enthusiasts 
for  Ennius,  have  praised  this  trash  as  if  it  were 
of  the  best  quality.'  .  .  .  The  nonsensical 
trifler  says:  ^  These  were  not  Cicero's  faults; 
they  were  the  faults  of  his  age.'  .  .  .  And 
furthermore:  ^  Even  our  poet  Virgil  put  in 
some  grating  verses  so  that  the  people  might 
recognize  an  antiquated  element  in  a  new  poem.' 
.  .  .  Young  men  may  be  as  enthusiastic  as 
they  will.  .  .  .  But  you  can  still  find  a  clever 
thing  or  two  in  his  works." 

Again,  therefore,  testimony  appears  with  re- 
gard to  his  ingenium,  or  ingyne,  as  Ben  Jonson 
and  the  Elizabethans  used  to  call  it.  Gellius 
was  a  lover  of  antiquity,  looking  backward; 
Seneca  was  teeming  with  the  future,  looking 
forward. 

The  third  critic,  however,  was  still  more  red- 
olent of  antiquity.     Fronto,  as  any  one  will 

[41] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

discover  on  reading  Pater's  Marius  the  Epi- 
curean, was  a  literary  man,  a  courtier,  and  a 
stylist,  a  citizen  of  the  place  and  age  when  over- 
refinement  had  become  supreme  in  Roman 
letters;  but  an  archaizer  borrowing  from  the 
Republican  Sallust  and  the  earlier  gallery  of 
worthies  like  Cato,  whose  clauses  he  supposed 
to  be  sounder,  although  many  of  his  own  dis- 
tortions reveal  the  evil  results  of  artificial 
coalitions  in  phraseology.  Fronto  accuses 
Seneca  of  "  jog-trot  sentences,"  "  glaring 
patches,''  "  sugar  plums,"  "  easy  lapses  into 
slippery  ways."  This  intimate  of  Marcus 
Aurelius  sought  the  artistic  bouquet  of  old 
Republican  style;  the  result  is  that  all  is  arti- 
ficiality in  him,  while  Seneca,  confessedly  "  the 
author  whom  one  finds  most  frequently  in  the 
hands  of  young  men,"  keeps  pace  with  the 
times,  and  even  outruns  his  age. 

The  summary  of  all  this  criticism  seems  to 
be  a  due  deference  to  the  wit  and  wisdom  and 
force  of  the  author  under  fire,  but  deprecation 
of  his  radicalism  in  thought  and  in  style.  The 
critics  did  not  understand  one  who  combined 
Plato  and  Stoicism,  who  filled  letters  with 
scientific  treatise-matter,  who  founded  the 
Essay,  who  put  popular  idioms  into  dignified 

[42] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

literature,  and  who  stepped  from  the  office  to 
the  study  as  readily  as  Mr.  Balfour  steps  from 
Downing  Street  into  studies  in  Theism  and 
Humanism. 

There  is  but  a  short  path  now  to  the  end 
of  creative  Roman  literature.  Plutarch,  the 
peer  of  Seneca  in  Montaigne's  opinion,  seems 
to  have  known  little  about  him  (which  is  an 
absurd  supposition),  or  else  to  have  lacked 
interest  in  one  whose  concern  was  with  the 
present,  who  stood  for  a  new  order  of  things, 
and  who  did  not  belong  to  the  gallery  of 
worthies  from  Greece  and  Rome.  Boethius 
dislikes  ''  the  Epicurean  herd,  the  Stoics,  and 
the  rest."  Macrobius,  who  lived  at  the  turn 
of  the  fourth  century  and  was  a  sort  of 
warmed-over  Gellius,  was  far  enough  away  in 
years  to  pilfer  several  passages  from  Seneca 
without  acknowledgment,  and  thus  tacitly  to 
take  him  for  granted.  Every  one  admits  his 
prominence  in  general,  but  most  of  these  suc- 
cessors fail  to  classify  him  as  a  standard 
literary  authority. 

Tacitus  gives  us  a  post-mortem  examination 
into  the  political  controversies  wherein  Seneca 
played  so  large  a  part.  He  sketches  him  strik- 
ingly, but  not  unfavorably.    Seneca  is  adroit, 

[43] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

clever  in  style  as  in  politics;  and  he  is  compli- 
mented indirectly  by  being  attacked  through 
the  agency  of  the  deteriores,  the  opposition 
party,  and  especially  of  one  Suillius,  who 
mounts  the  stump  on  all  occasions,  a  man  whose 
character,  like  his  name,  is  not  above  suspicion. 
Suillius  evidently  represented  the  reactionaries, 
who  feared  the  new  system  of  government 
which  Seneca  and  Burrus  were  maintaining. 
There  were  several  reasons  why  this  opposition 
took  place. 

Seneca,  like  Cicero,  Napoleon,  and  Lincoln, 
was  a  novus  homo.  This  name  had  for  centuries 
been  applied  by  the  Romans  to  those  whose 
family  had  never  before  been  included  in  of- 
ficialdom and  the  governing  caste,  to  those 
whose  halls  contained  no  busts  of  departed 
senators.  Furthermore,  he  came  at  a  time 
when  the  machine  of  Augustus  was  a  thing  of 
the  past,  when  a  weaker  Senate  or  an  eccentric 
Emperor  or  a  threatening  army  rendered 
necessary  a  careful  balancing  of  statecraft  and 
tradition,  and  when  rich  freedmen  of  foreign 
antecedents  had  control  of  all  the  expert  details 
of  bureaucracy.  There  was  no  man-for-man 
responsibility  in  the  Empire,  as  there  was  in 
the  Republic  which  had  conquered  Hannibal 

[44] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

or  brought  the  Mediterranean  under  the  sway 
of  Rome.  Patricians  and  plebeians  no  longer 
heckled  one  another  from  the  opposition 
benches;  there  was  a  self-satisfied  aristocracy, 
and  a  proletariat  whose  sole  aim  was  to  be  fed 
and  amused.  Hence,  from  the  year  50  a.d. 
the  problem  was  how  to  make  the  court  func- 
tion in  relation  to  the  state,  how  to  balance 
imperial  caprice  with  efficiency  of  administra- 
tion, how  to  interpret  Rome  at  a  time  when 
elections  were  a  farce  and  the  professional 
politician  was  the  only  instrument. 

The  new  feature  of  Seneca^s  activity  was 
the  fact  that  he  represented  the  cabinet  system 
of  government  in  which  he  performed  or  super- 
intended most  of  the  functions  of  such  a 
system  in  his  own  person.  Unlike  Augustus, 
Maecenas,  and  Agrippa,  who  divided  up  the 
duties  of  Empire,  Seneca,  except  for  the  Prae- 
torian Guard  and  the  policing  of  the  city,  seems 
to  have  gained  by  degrees  the  whole  control  of 
Rome. 

Upon  the  prime  minister,  therefore,  rested 
the  responsibility  of  guiding  a  prince  whose 
power  was  in  practice  unlimited.  And  the 
difficulty  lay  in  the  fact  that  Seneca's  own 
power  was  not  specific  but  depended  upon  the 

[45] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

original  invitation  of  Claudius  and  Agrippina, 
upon  the  cooperation  of  several  rich  and  able 
freedmen  whom  he  had  to  keep  balanced  one 
against  the  other,  and  upon  the  momentum  of 
the  provincial  administration.  At  the  death  of 
Claudius  in  54  he  was  supreme,  and  master  of 
the  situation  as  long  as  he  could  harmonize  the 
discordant  elements  in  the  state.  It  seems  that 
he  succeeded  in  doing  this  for  seven  or  eight 
years, —  a  magnificent  experiment.  Nero  was 
malleable  and  popular  in  his  youth.  Seneca's 
method  of  handling  him  was  frequent  counsel, 
given  in  writing  and  with  entire  publicity. 
Tacitus  mentions  many  speeches  composed  for 
Nero  on  occasions  of  state,  but  most  interesting 
of  all  is  the  De  dementia,  which  was  brought 
out  shortly  after  the  prince's  accession  to  the 
throne,  and  which  is  compounded  of  skilful 
advice,  flattery,  and  reminders  of  the  responsi- 
bility under  which  an  emperor  must  always 
rest.  "  You  must  consider  attentively  this 
enormous  throng,  quarrelsome,  mutinous,  and 
wayward.  You  must  reflect  that  if  it  breaks 
the  yoke  it  will  sweep  along  to  its  own  undoing 
as  well  as  to  the  ruin  of  others."  .  .  .  One  of 
the  chief  contributions  of  the  Prime  Minister 
to  the  science  of  good  government  is  his  oft- 

[46] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

repeated  doctrine,  expressed  both  in  this  work 
and  elsewhere,  that  the  revolutionary  violence 
of  earlier  days,  built  upon  individual  force, 
is  responsible  for  all  the  evils  of  history,  and 
that  intelligent  cooperation  in  the  control  of 
a  self-denying  ruler  is  the  solution  of  the 
problem.  ''  Julius  Caesar  involved  himself  so 
closely  with  the  commonwealth  that  neither 
could  be  extricated  without  ruining  both;  for 
the  ruler  needs  backing,  and  the  state  needs 
control."  MansuetudOy  or  human  sympathy, 
is  the  keynote  of  the  treatise ;  this  quality  must 
be  seasoned  with  intelligence  of  the  highest 
order.  The  clemency  of  Nero  must  be  original, 
and  not  like  the  "  tired-out  cruelty  "  of  Augus- 
tus, who  adopted  a  pacific  policy  after  wading 
through  the  blood  of  several  revolutions. 
Seneca  knew  his  Romans :  "  No  animal  is  more 
pettish,  or  more  in  need  of  skilful  handling, 
or  more  to  be  humoured,  than  man."  It  was  a 
far  cry,  as  we  have  said  before,  back  to  the 
citizen-farmer  of  the  early  Republic;  the  whole 
cosmopolitan  world-mob  sat  in  the  amphi- 
theatre or  received  its  dole  of  grain  on  stated 
days. 

The  work  is  not  startlingly  original  in  its 
separate  ideas;  in  fact  it  is  full  of  tiresome 

[47] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

repetitions;  but  it  is  replete  with  a  new  spirit. 
Burrus,  the  commander  of  the  Praetorian 
Guard,  is  complimented,  not  as  the  head  of  an 
army  but  as  the  wise  controller  of  a  police 
system.  And  the  whole  message  of  the  im- 
perial tutor  is  a  plea  for  understanding,  for  a 
new  slate,  for  a  point  of  view  which  will  give 
every  Roman  some  opportunity  to  make 
choices,  to  take  more  part  in  government,  and 
to  gain  greater  freedom  in  life,  liberty,  and  the 
pursuit  of  happiness.  We  shall  call  attention, 
later,  to  the  influence  of  this  pamphlet  upon 
Calvin  and  its  significance  in  the  theocratic 
history  of  the  sixteenth  century.  The  "  good 
emperors,"  from  Nerva  through  Marcus  Au- 
relius,  are  under  an  obligation  to  Seneca  for 
this  experiment  in  government;  and  it  was  but 
a  natural  relapse  toward  the  revolutionary 
period  when  Rome  was  compelled  to  endure  the 
vagaries  of  the  later  Nero,  the  bloody  year  of 
68-9,  and  the  cruelties  of  Domitian.  It  was 
of  course  more  logical  for  power  to  be  con- 
stitutionally centered  in  the  hands  of  a  strong 
Emperor  like  Trajan,  than  for  a  weak  monarch 
to  be  propped  by  an  adviser,  no  matter  how 
intelligent  or  conscientious  the  latter  might  be. 
But  this  very  centralization  provoked  the  ire 

[48] 


AND    HIS     MODERN    MESSAGE 

of  those  who  thought  that  the  good  old  days 
of  senatorial  participation  might  return. 

Pliny  the  Elder  comes  to  our  minds  the 
instant  we  think  of  ancient  science.  And  yet 
Pliny  himself  acknowledges  Seneca  ^  to  be  an 
authority  on  marine  zoology,  geology,  earth- 
quakes, and  meteorology.  We  have  seen  that 
the  latter  was  also  a  geographer,  having  begun 
his  investigations  early,  recorded  his  observa- 
tions in  Egypt,  and  made  a  study  of  the  peoples 
of  India.  Pliny  is  the  more  highly  regarded 
now;  but  throughout  the  Middle  Ages  the 
Naturales  Quaestiones,  or  Natural  History,  of 
Seneca  was  the  chief  textbook,  outranking  all 
the  Bestiaries  and  Physiologi  which  formed 
educational  pabulum  for  monastery-schools  and 
for  the  children  of  the  better  classes.  The 
difference  between  the  two  writers  is  that 
Seneca  speculates  more  on  his  own  account, 
while  Pliny's  work  includes  art,  botany,  miner- 
alogy, and  everything  that  we  now  classify 
under  the  head  of  biology,  tabulated  with  the 
greatest  care  and  with  acknowledgment  to 
every  author  laid  under  contribution.  Studies 
of  volcanoes  and  earthquakes,  with  their  com- 
mon origin,  the  source  of  the  Nile,  reasons  for 
thunder,  winds,  waters,  and  comets  are  the 

[49] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

work  of  Seneca  the  observer,  sometimes 
blundering,  sometimes  making  a  lucky  hit,  but 
always  inquisitive  and  seeming  to  understand 
rather  than  merely  to  catalogue  what  others 
have  said.  Even  in  his  other  works  Seneca 
shows  the  same  inquiring  mind:  in  the  57th 
Epistle,  which  describes  a  journey  through  the 
famous  Naples  tunnel,  the  "  Crypta  Neapo- 
litana,"  he  speculates  upon  the  air  currents 
and  the  mental  effect  of  contrasts  in  light  and 
darkness.  The  mind  of  Seneca  was  curious 
and  original ;  his  physics  contributed  to  his  own 
philosophy.  With  all  his  Stoicism  he  was  a 
pluralist  at  heart,  like  William  James;  he  could 
tolerate  no  generalities  which  were  irrevocable, 
but  made  up  his  world  from  his  own  personal 
investigations  and  ideas.  He  was  indebted  to 
Aristotle's  Meteorology,  to  Theophrastus,  to 
Aratus,  to  Varro;  he  may  have  compared  notes 
and  collaborated  with  Pliny,  whose  work  was 
published  twelve  years  after  Seneca's  death. 
He  is  refreshingly  undogmatic,  incomplete,  and 
at  times  even  senile.  We  cannot  rightly  accuse 
him  of  all  the  moralizing  and  dogmatism  which 
spoiled  the  objective  accuracy  of  medieval 
Science  before  Roger  Bacon.  Nor  can  we 
blame  him  for  assuming  that  imprisoned  air  is 

[so] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

the  main  agency  in  earthquakes,  or  for  not 
knowing  that  the  rainbow's  colors  are  the  result 
of  decomposition  of  white  light  instead  of  a 
seeming  color  which  does  not  really  exist,  or 
for  believing  that  lightning  melts  metals  and 
freezes  wine,  or  that  the  sun  is  supported  by 
exhalations  from  the  earth.  In  his  assumption, 
however,  that  comets  may  have  orbits  which 
carry  them  beyond  the  zodiac,  that  there  is 
an  evolutionary  process  in  the  world,  and  that 
rings  round  the  sun  are  often  the  result  of  at- 
mospheric conditions,  he  is  sound.  But  after 
all,  how  accurate  were  the  astronomers  before 
Galileo,  the  physicists  before  Newton,  or  the 
biologists  before  Darwin?  Seneca's  guesses 
are  as  good  as  those  of  any  other  speculator 
before  the  discoveries  of  modern  Science. 

He  wrote  for  later  ages  rather  than  for  Rome. 
He  was  the  primus  artijex  of  a  point  of  view 
which  conventional  Rome  did  not  understand. 
Perhaps  this  was  because  his  writing  was  so 
occasional;  he  had  tossed  off  tragedies  to  re- 
lieve the  dreariness  of  exile;  he  had  put  to- 
gether essays  for  purposes  of  consolation  or 
personal  relief;  he  had  made  himself  a  master 
of  science;  and  in  the  Epistles,  his  greatest 
work,  he  had  sought  to  sink  himself  in  philoso- 

[SI] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

phy  and  quietism,  and  thus  be  rid  of  a  haunting 
burden, —  association  with  Nero  in  the  govern- 
ment of  the  Roman  Empire.  To  himself  and 
his  contemporaries  he  was  a  clever  stylist  and 
man  of  affairs;  to  us  he  is  a  philosopher. 


[52] 


III.  HOW  HE  APPEALED  TO 
THE  CHURCH 

IT  IS  the  Christian  writers,  the  early  Fathers 
of  the  growing  Christian  Church,  who  ele- 
vate Seneca  into  prominence  as  more  than 
a  man  of  affairs  or  an  author  of  questionable 
style.  When  the  new  religion  has  ceased  to 
be  a  secret  ritual  and  has  risen  superior  to  the 
worship  of  Jupiter  Capitolinus,  we  find  that  the 
subject  of  this  sketch  is  as  warmly  welcomed 
as  he  was  formerly  abused.  But  it  is  for  a 
different  reason.  The  leaders  of  the  Church 
were  less  interested  in  a  way  of  saying  things 
than  in  the  thing  to  be  said;  they  were  desirous 
of  winning  over  as  many  educated  converts  as 
possible  to  the  new  faith.  In  Seneca  they  dis- 
covered a  thinker  who  struck  to  the  root  of 
their  problem,  whose  language  and  traditions 
appealed  to  them  as  citizeins  both  of  Rome  and 
of  the  City  not  built  with  hands.  East  and 
West  could  meet  through  the  message  of  such 
an  interpreter,  especially  along  religious 
lines.     The   lapse    of   time   had   wiped   out 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

cliques  in  literature  and  politics;  the  lasting 
qualities  of  the  man  were  all  that  mattered; 
and  at  this  point  the  criterion  became  one  of 
religion  and  religion  only,  for  several  centuries. 
St.  Jerome  himself  had  said:  "  If  you  read  all 
the  books  of  the  philosophers  you  cannot  help 
finding  in  them  some  part  of  the  vessels  of 
God."  ^  But  Seneca  was  placed  above  Cicero 
in  this  category. 

The  reasons  for  this  are  not  far  to  seek. 
Seneca  was  a  Stoic,  and  Stoicism  was  the  porch 
to  Christianity.  Then,  as  now,  it  was  the 
thought-force  that  lay  nearest  to  our  inspi- 
rational religion.  It  was  Stoicism  which  made 
the  Christian  fathers  claim  Seneca  as  one  of 
their  own,  which  made  St.  Paul  quote  Aratus 
to  the  Athenians  as  one  "  in  whom  we  live  and 
move  and  have  our  being."  There  is  Stoicism 
in  the  Invictus  of  W.  E.  Henley  and  in  the 
No  Coward  Soul  is  Mine  of  Emily  Bronte. 
Wordsworth  is  full  of  it: 

"  A  sense  sublime 
0/  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
A  motion  and  a  spirit  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 
And  rolls  through  all  things." 

[54] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

William  James,  greatest  of  American  phi- 
losophers, is  in  harmony  therewith:  ^'I  feel  that 
we  are  Nature's  through  and  through,  that  we 
are  wholly  conditioned;  that  not  a  wiggle  of 
our  will  happens  save  as  the  result  of  physical 
laws;  and  yet,  notwithstanding,  we  are  en  rap- 
port with  reason.  .  .  .  It  is  not  that  we  are 
all  nature  but  some  point  which  is  reason,  but 
that  all  is  nature  and  all  is  reason  too."  And 
John  Morley  says  to  us:  "An  open-hearted 
Stoicism  is  no  bankrupt  or  useless  thing." 
Stoicism,  more  than  the  plant-and-animal 
studies  of  the  Peripatetics,  more  than  the  vague 
realism  of  the  Academics,  more  than  the 
laissez-faire  of  the  Epicureans,  had  struck  home 
to  the  Roman  mind.  It  had  taken  the  fancy 
of  the  Scipionic  circle  because  it  combined 
idealism  with  citizenship.  It  took  by  storm 
the  Romans  of  the  Empire  who  v/ished  by  free 
will  to  think  themselves  into  another  world, 
and  sometimes  to  betake  themselves  thither 
voluntarily.  It  had  run  the  blockade  of  the 
Alexandrian  age  and  had  escaped  unscathed 
as  a  workable  philosophy,  compounded  of  most 
of  the  other  creeds.  Cousin  tells  us  that  all 
philosophies  change  in  a  regular  cycle  of  Sen- 
sationalism, Idealism,  Scepticism,  and  Mysti- 

[55] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

cism.  The  essence  of  the  Stoic  philosophy  is 
its  combination  of  these  four  phases,  and  this 
explains  its  consequent  lasting  power. 

The  Stoics,  who  for  three  hundred  years 
before  Seneca's  time  had  been  building  up  a 
creed,  now  adding  to  their  doctrines  and  now 
subtracting,  believed  that  knowledge  was  at- 
tainable. They  began  where  the  Epicureans 
stopped,  with  the  sensations.  These,  they  held, 
produced  a  "  mind  picture,"  which  led  to  the 
concept,  and  from  the  concept  came  knowledge. 
One  of  their  earlier  masters  compared  this 
process  first  to  the  open  palm,  then  to  the 
curved  fingers,  then  to  the  closed  fist,  and 
finally  to  the  fist  clasped  tightly  in  the  other 
hand  —  resulting  in  knowledge,  the  gift  only 
of  the  wise  man.  Whether  the  process  of  thus 
assimilating  and  developing  sensation  into 
science  was  correct,  could  be  tested  only  by 
reason,  logic,  and  will-power.  The  machinery 
of  speech,  the  sequence  of  right  thinking,  and 
unity  with  the  spirit  of  the  universe  were  the 
three  ways  which  answered  the  Sceptics  and 
Epicureans  and  offered  a  solution  in  the  face  of 
the  learned  doubt  of  the  Academics.  In  the 
last  analysis  the  ''  inward  touch "  must  be 
present:    this   corresponded   with    the    inspi- 

[56] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

rational  "  daemon  "  of  Socrates,  the  inner  light 
of  Thomas  a  Kempis  and  the  Quakers,  and  the 
visions  of  St.  Paul. 

Stoicism  acknowledged  Deity  and  welcomed 
it.  Stoicism  bade  its  followers  take  part  in 
the  duties  of  family  and  citizenship.  It  pre- 
scribed no  monastic  or  eccentric  rules,  and 
upheld  all  the  features  of  life  that  men  regard 
as  desirable.  Virtue  alone  was  good;  but 
office,  wealth,  influence,  and  worldly  enjoy- 
ments were  "  advantageous,"  provided  they  did 
not  break  down  the  moral  fiber  of  the  possessor. 
Only,  they  must  in  the  last  resort  be  recog- 
nized as  non-essentials.  Evil  was  an  incidental; 
good  conduct  was  the  only  criterion.  The 
soul,  part  of  the  World-Spirit,  was  immortal 
in  the  sense  of  non-perishability:  how  far  it 
was  individually  immortal  was  often  debated, 
and  by  none  more  than  by  Seneca. 

Such  are  the  general  ideas  associated  with 
Stoicism.  Different  exponents  argued  differ- 
ently on  its  various  phases:  one  placed  the 
whole  function  in  perfect  reasoning  and  syllo- 
gistic accuracy;  another  interpreted  life  by 
Nature  as  the  sole  guide;  another  abandoned 
the  perfection-theory  and  admitted  worldly 
considerations  as  on  a  par  with  virtue;  and  at 

[57] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

the  end  of  the  Roman  Republic  we  find  scien- 
tific study  and  eclectic  combinations  overcom- 
ing the  absolutism  of  the  Greek  founders.  But 
Stoicism  was  a  spiritual,  progressive,  and 
optimistic  creed.  The  hymn  of  Cleanthes® 
gives  us  this  spirit: 

"  Glory  would  some  through  bitter  strife  attain, 
And  some  are  eager  after  lawless  gain; 
Some  lust  for  sensual  delights,  but  each 
Finds  that  too  soon  his  pleasure  turns  to  pain. 

But,  Zeus  all-bountiful!    The  thunder- flame 
And  the  dark  cloud  thy  majesty  proclaim: 
From  ignorance  deliver  us,  that  leads 
The  sons  of  men  to  sorrow  and  to  shame. 

Wherefore  dispel  it,  Father,  from  the  soul 
And  grant  that  Wisdom  may  our  life  control, 
Wisdom  which  teaches  Thee  to  guide  the  world 
Upon  the  path  of  justice  to  its  goal. 

So  winning  honor  Thee  shall  we  requite 
With  love,  lauding  still  thy  works  of  might; 
Since  gods   nor  men  find  worthier  meed  than 

this  — 
The  universal  Law  to  praise  aright.** 

When  Seneca,  after  flirting  in  his  youth  with 
Pythagoreanism    (especially    because    of    its 

[58] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

vegetarian  doctrine)  and  with  certain  of  the 
eastern  cults,  took  up  Stoicism,  the  creed  which 
he  adopted  had  been  a  favorite  one  at 
Rome  for  nearly  two  hundred  years.  We  have 
seen  its  influence  on  the  Scipionic  circle;  we 
know  that  gradually  its  world-citizenship  de- 
veloped the  "  law  of  nations  "  as  contrasted 
with  the  state  law  of  Rome,  and  that  much  of 
Mediterranean  cosmopolitanism  is  due  to  the 
Stoic  ius  gentium.  What  influence  it  had  upon 
the  actual  government  of  Rome  may  be  gauged 
from  Cato  the  Younger,  from  Seneca  himself, 
from  Marcus  Aurelius,  and  from  the  reactions 
which  it  produced  in  the  case  of  the  Emperor 
Domitian,  who  refused  its  advances  and 
ejected  its  upholders  from  Rome  —  Epictetus 
among  others.  And  Cicero  himself,  who 
always  looked  upon  Stoicism  with  favor,  helped 
to  make  it  fashionable  in  cultivated  circles. 
It  is  sufficient  to  mention  Brutus,  the  tyran- 
nicide, in  order  to  show  how  strongly  its  leaven 
was  working  on  the  theory  of  statecraft. 
Finally,  the  very  parodies  of  Horace,  like  the 
quips  of  Addison  upon  London  fashions,  show 
to  what  an  extent  Stoicism  had  taken  hold  upon 
the  "  progressive  "  second-raters  of  the  day: 
"  growing  the  beard  of  wisdom  "  ;  "  none  but 

[S9] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

the  wise  man  is  sane  "  ;  "  the  wise  man  is 
second  only  to  Jupiter,  rich,  free,  respected, 
handsome,  king  of  kings,  and  more  sound 
than  anyone  else, —  except  when  he  has  hay- 
fever!  " 

Seneca  is  unique  in  his  interpretation^^  of 
this  Stoic  philosophy  because  to  so  marked 
a  degree  he  admits  into  it  the  theories  of 
other  schools.  "  One  may  debate  with  Soc- 
rates, be  skeptical  with  Carneades,  over- 
come human  frailty  with  the  Stoics,  or  go 
beyond  it  with  the  Cynics;  — since  the  uni- 
verse allows  us  to  go  into  partnership  with 
all  the  ages."  "  I  cross  over  into  the 
enemy's  camp  (Epicurus),  not  as  a  deserter, 
but  as  a  scout."  The  first  thirty-three 
Epistles,  and  many  parts  of  his  dialogues  are 
linked  with  the  name  of  Epicurus:  "In  my 
own  opinion  Epicurus  is  really  a  strong  man, 
even  though  he  did  wear  long  sleeves." 
"  These  utterances  do  not  belong  to  Epicurus; 
they  are  common  property."  "  I  will  say,  in 
the  teeth  of  the  Stoic  school,  that  the  counsels 
of  Epicurus  are  holy  and  righteous,  and  if  you 
inspect  them  closely,  puritanic:  he  thins  down 
pleasure  and  assigns  to  it  the  same  rules  that 
we  assign  to  virtue  —  namely,  obedience  to 

[60] 


AND     HIS     MODERN    MESSAGE 

Nature."  "  I  shall  use  the  old  road;  but  if  I 
find  one  that  makes  a  shorter  cut  and  is 
smoother  to  travel,  I  shall  open  the  new  road." 
This  attitude  may  be  contrasted  with  Cicero^s 
regular  scorn  of  a  school  which  seemed  to  him 
self-indulgent  and  mentally  indolent. 

Again,  Seneca  has  a  profound  respect  for 
Plato.  The  58th  Epistle  is  devoted  to  Plato's 
doctrine  of  existence  and  to  his  Theory  of 
Ideas;  the  65th  bows  to  Aristotle  and  Plato, 
while  defending  the  Stoic  plan  of  Matter  and 
God.  The  later  Academic  school  is  criticized  as 
"  having  introduced  a  new  knowledge  —  non- 
knowledge  "  ;  but  the  idealism  of  Plato  —  the 
thought  that  if  the  transcendental  soul  is  not 
recognized,  all  thought  and  contemplation  are 
futile  —  runs  through  Seneca's  prose  writings 
as  a  consistent  thread. 

Pythagoreanism  was  essentially  eccentric  in 
the  early  empire.  And  yet  Seneca  began  by 
following  two  leads  of  this  school  and  by 
observing  the  usual  vegetarian  apprenticeship. 
"  The  days  of  my  youth  coincided  with  the  rule 
of  Tiberius;  and  at  that  time  foreign  rituals 
were  being  expelled  from  the  city.  Among 
proofs  of  their  superstitious  influence  was  absti- 
nence from  animal  food.     So  at  the  request 

[61] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

of  my  father,  who  feared  a  bad  name  rather 
than  disliked  philosophy,  I  returned  to  my 
former  habits.  It  was  not  hard  for  him  to  per- 
suade me  to  dine  more  luxuriously!  "  Hence, 
ever  retaining  a  respect  for  "  the  silent  and 
holy  retreat  of  Pythagoras,"  Seneca  turned  to 
Stoicism  and  studied  under  its  two  leading 
contemporary  interpreters. 

One  who  reads  Seneca's  prose  writings,  how- 
ever, with  a  detachment  from  the  ultra-theo- 
retical points  of  view  will  note  that  perhaps 
the  strongest  bond  with  any  past  master  of  phi- 
losophy is  that  with  Posidonius.  This  scientist, 
whose  writings  have  come  down  to  us  only 
in  scattered  fragments,  was  mainly  responsible 
for  the  spreading  of  Stoicism  throughout  the 
Roman  world  in  the  first  century  B.C.,  for  the 
scientific  spirit  which  made  so  strong  an 
appeal  to  Seneca,  and  for  the  flexible  tone  of 
the  school  as  contrasted  with  the  logic-haunted 
works  of  the  early  Greek  founders.  For  ex- 
ample, while  returning  to  the  old  theory  that 
the  universe  is  destroyed  by  fire  and  recreated 
at  periodic  intervals,  and  while  accepting 
divination  and  the  rituals  of  sacrifice,  he 
"  Baconizes  "  philosophy  by  making  scientific 
observation  the  most  important  element  and 
[62] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

by  admitting  the  specific  rules  of  conduct 
which  so  many  philosophers  regarded  as  out- 
side the  pale  of  the  Stoic  creed  proper.  The 
whole  90th  Epistle  is  occupied  with  debating 
Posidonius'  contention  that  the  inventions  and 
discoveries  of  early  man  were  the  result  of 
philosophy,  and  with  maintaining  that  philoso- 
phy is  not  so  closely  connected  with  arts  and 
crafts.  Perhaps  the  question  may  be  begged. 
Perhaps  we  may  say  that  it  all  depends  on  the 
definition,  just  as  the  "  natural  philosophy  '^ 
of  fifty  years  ago  has  now  to  be  explained  as 
"  physics."  Seneca  pays  Posidonius  the  com- 
pliment of  analyzing  his  contention  carefully, 
although  he  disagrees  with  him.  But  in  the 
same  letter  he  speaks  of  him  as  "  of  the 
number  of  those  who  have  contributed  the 
most  to  philosophy." 

Seneca  therefore  tones  down  the  extremes 
of  Stoicism;  he  does  for  the  first  century  of 
the  Empire  what  Posidonius  had  done  for  the 
last  century  of  the  Republic.  He  found 
Roman  religion  mere  mummery;  he  therefore 
abandoned  divination  and  sacrifice  in  favor  of 
communion  and  prayer:  "We  do  not  need  to 
uplift  our  hands  towards  heaven,  or  to  beg  the 
keeper  of  a  temple  to  let  us  approach  the 

[63] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

idoPs  ear,  as  if  in  this  way  our  prayers 
were  more  likely  to  be  heard."  "  Nothing 
is  shut  off  from  the  sight  of  God.  He 
is  witness  of  our  souls  and  He  comes  into 
the  very  midst  of  our  thoughts."  He  smiles 
away  many  of  the  paradoxes  which  we  have 
seen  that  Horace  burlesqued;  he  devotes 
whole  chapters  to  proving  that  cast-iron 
syllogisms  are  of  no  avail  for  one  who  seeks 
the  higher  truth, —  just  as  Benedetto  Croce 
in  recent  years  bade  us  forget  the  lifeless 
abstractions  which  marred  the  philosophy  of 
fifty  years  ago:  "I  adhere  to  my  testimony, 
that  this  sort  of  proof  does  not  please  me. 
It  is  shameful  for  one  to  go  forth  to  battle  on 
behalf  of  gods  and  men,  armed  only  with  an 
awl!  "  He  admits  that  "  soul  "  may,  accord- 
ing to  the  older  Stoic  view,  be  defined  as 
"substance"  or  "body";  and  when  he 
finishes  the  argument,  destroys  its  logic  by 
establishing  the  spirituality  of  "  soul."  And, 
amid  the  debate  as  to  the  soul's  imperish- 
ability,—  whether  it  is  crushed  out  of  us  at 
death,  whether  it  survives  as  a  fiery  particle, 
whether  there  is  a  sort  of  part-time  immor- 
tality, or  whether  it  remains  as  a  personality 
after  being  freed  from  the  prison-body, —  he 

[  64  ]  AS 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

concludes  for  a  future  life,  with  all  the  glory 
of  reward  for  life  nobly  lived. 

The  allusions,  in  Seneca's  Epistles  alone,  to 
a  single  deity,  would  be  sufficient  to  strike 
a  Church  Father  with  a  kinship  of  common 
interests  and  beliefs.  Many  a  Pagan  philoso- 
pher had  made  God  more  unified  and  personal. 
Epictetus  had  said:  "  God  is  within,  and  your 
daemon  is  within,"  often  bearing  witness  to 
concentrated  divinity  rather  than  to  the  poly- 
theism of  his  predecessors.  Plato  himself 
tended  in  that  direction :  Socrates  and  his  Holy 
Guide  are  very  near  to  the  Christian  soul.  But 
Seneca  said  the  same  thing  iij  a  manner  which 
ithese  Romans  could  understand  and  apply: 
''  God  is  near  you,  he  is  with  you.  ...  A 
holy  spirit  indwells  within  us,  one  who  marks 
our  good  and  bad  deeds,  and  is  our  guardian." 
Or,  "  Why  should  you  not  believe  that  some- 
thing of  divinity  exists  in  one  who  is  a  part  of 
God?  All  this  universe  which  encompasses  us 
is  one,  and  it  is  God;  we  are  associates  of  God; 
we  are  his  members:"  —  fundamental  Stoic 
doctrine  no  doubt,  but  clothed  in  Christian 
language.  Examine  the  works  of  St.  Ambrose, 
and  you  will  see  how  many  Stoic  elements 

[6s] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

form  the  background  of  his  arguments.  Con- 
sider the  connection  of  St.  Augustine's  servitus 
dei  est  summa  Ubertas  with  Seneca's  Epicu- 
rean borrowing:  phUosophiae  servias  oportet, 
Mt  tibi  contingat  vera  Ubertas.  Note  also  how 
other  writers  take  over  the  four  virtues  into 
Christianity,  and  build  a  new  edifice  upon  the 
old  foundation:  "The  four  rivers  of  Eden 
represent  the  four  virtues, —  prudence,  temper- 
ance, courage,  and  justice."  When,  therefore, 
M.  Levy-Bruhl  ^^  analyzes  Seneca's  ideas  of 
Deity,  showing  that  Deus  ipse  se  fecit  is  an 
advance  on  the  "  nature,"  "  fate,"  and  "  for- 
tune "  definitions  of  his  Stoic  predecessors, 
that  this  God  contains  more  of  reason  than  of 
fatalism,  that  Lactantius  recognizes  the  con- 
geniaHty  of  St.  Peter's  God  with  Seneca's,  and 
that  the  God  as  thus  portrayed  is  a  more 
human  God  than  any  other  Stoic  divinity,  we 
see  at  once  the  reason  why  Tertullian  called 
Seneca  "  ours."  In  fact  it  is  through  Lac- 
tantius that  we  know  of  Seneca's  Exhorta- 
tiones  and  his  De  Immatura  Morte.  And  so 
it  goes.  There  is,  in  reality,  nothing  ancient 
and  nothing  modern  where  the  Eternal  is 
concerned. 

Many  of  these  early  Christians,   scholars 

[66] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

trained  in  the  classic  school,  felt  the  charm  of 
the  old  pagan  writings,  as  St.  Augustine,  for 
example,  was  ravished  by  the  beauty  of 
Cicero's  Hortensius  and  by  the  romance  of 
Dido's  tragic  end.  Minucius  Felix,  the  first 
Roman  who  holds  a  literary  brief  for  Christi- 
anity, consciously  and  unconsciously  echoes 
Seneca;  and  Lactantius  patterns  one  of  his 
themes  upon  the  opening  of  the  De  Provi- 
dentia,  wherein  the  world-old  question  is 
discussed:  why  the  wise  man  who  is  captain 
of  his  own  soul  is  compelled  to  suffer  affliction 
while  the  baser  sort  go  scot-free.  This  ques- 
tion had  been  asked  by  Job  and  the  Psalmist, 
and  repeated  itself  down  through  Fenelon  and 
the  great  French  preachers.  It  was  Seneca's 
modern  and  forward-looking  note  that  ap- 
pealed to  the  early  Church;  and  that  is  per- 
haps why  they  passed  over  the  heads  of  pagan 
saints  like  Epictetus  and  selected  our  philoso- 
pher as  their  advocate  in  the  foreign  ranks. 

This  idea  of  similarity  was  pushed  to  an 
extreme  in  two  cases,  the  one,  a  myth  of  Mes- 
sianic tendencies  which  was  seriously  discussed 
by  a  German  scholar  forty  years  ago,  and  the 
other  a  fabrication  of  a  correspondence  be- 
tween Seneca  and  the  Apostle  Paul.    The  for- 

[67] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

gery  (a  pious  one,  to  be  sure)  dates  perhaps 
from  the  fourth  century,  although  it  was  not 
long  ago  that  the  series  of  letters  was  regarded 
as  genuine.  No  doubt  St.  Paul  was  in  Rome 
during  Seneca's  life-time,  and  it  is  not  incon- 
ceivable that  they  may  have  met  and  ex- 
changed ideas.  We  know  that  in  his  youth 
Seneca  expressed  an  interest  in  non-Roman 
cults;  it  is  impossible  that  the  prime  minister 
of  the  Empire  should  have  been  in  entire  igno- 
rance of  a  worship  that  caught  the  attention 
of  all  Rome  by  its  unusual  features  and  its 
ascetic  practices.  It  may  have  been  one  of  the 
estranging  elements  between  Nero  and  his 
minister;  and  it  is  possible  that  the  martyr- 
doms may  have  led  to  Seneca's  resignation. 
Conversely,  as  we  have  no  positive  evidence 
one  way  or  another,  we  might,  if  we  were  con- 
fronted with  facts  that  now  lie  buried,  be 
compelled  to  blush  for  Seneca  as  an  accomplice 
in  the  whole  cruel  business.  But  we  cannot 
follow  certain  biographers  who  uphold  the 
latter  point  of  view.  These  fourteen  letters, 
eight  by  the  Roman  and  six  by  Paul,  contain 
such  anachronisms  as  an  appreciation  of  the 
latter's  epistle  to  the  Galatians,  a  chatty  ac- 
count of  the  great  fire  of  the  year  64,  and  a 
[68] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Style  that  would  have  set  on  edge  the  teeth  of 
both  men,  who  were  instinctive  writers  of  force 
and  cultivation,  geniuses  both.  But  such  a 
test  was  not  necessary  in  the  eyes  of  later 
Christians;  they  had  discovered  one  who  spoke 
and  wrote  from  the  same  ethical  standard  as 
their  own. 

Another  connection  is  Seneca's  brother  Gal- 
lio,  the  Gallio  of  Acts  i8,  11-17,  who  on  a 
famous  occasion  decided  that  "  these  matters 
were  out  of  his  province."  The  gentle  and 
popular  Gallio,  Governor  of  the  Greek  province 
of  Achaia  from  51  to  52  a.d.,  presided  at  the 
court  before  which  St.  Paul  appeared  as  a 
defendant,  accused  of  illegal  religious  practices. 

"  One  thing  only  I  see  most  clear, 
As  I  pray  you  also  see. 
Claudius  Caesar  hath  set  me  here 
Rome's  deputy  to  be. 
It  is  her  peace  that  ye  go  to  break  — 
Not  mine,  nor  any  king's. 
But,  touching  your  clamour  of  '  Conscience  sake, 
I  care  for  none  of  these  things." 

"  Whether  ye  rise  for  the  sake  of  a  creed, 
Or  riot  in  hope  of  spoil, 
Equally  will  I  punish  the  deed, 
Equally  check  the  broil; 

[69] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

Nowise  permitting  injustice  at  all 
From  whatever  doctrine  it  springs  — 
'Rut  —  whether  ye  follow  Priapus  or  Paul, 
I  care  for  none  of  these  things" 

These  words  of  Kipling  (from  "  Gallio's 
Song"),  and  the  authorized  translation  from 
the  Scripture  do  the  Roman  injustice;  the 
passage  really  means:  Gallio  felt  that  the 
accusation  was  not  in  his  jurisdiction  to 
handle. 

And  yet,  even  though  Seneca  may  have 
known  St.  Paul,  and  although  he  embraced  a 
Stoicism  which  was  in  general  nearer  to  Christi- 
anity than  the  Stoicism  of  any  predecessor,  it 
was,  in  particular,  his  view  of  humanity  that 
drew  the  interest  of  the  Church, —  a  sympathy 
with  his  fellow-men.  We  have  no  record  of 
any  legislation  originated  by  him  which 
showed  a  desire  to  repress  or  torment  mankind. 
He  was  an  apostle  of  humanitarianism. 

Although  we  know  that  the  Greeks  fre- 
quently felt  scruples  as  to  the  advisability  of 
slavery,  we  know  that  reform  never  came  and 
that  "  big  business  "  and  the  slave  trade  at 
Delos  were  too  strong  for  the  sentimentalists. 
Roman  law  treated  the  slave  as  a  resy  and  the 

[70] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

early  Romans  gave  the  law  every  benefit  when 
in  doubt.  After  Augustus  came  a  reign  of 
terror,  manifesting  itself  in  family  rather  than 
in  national  rebellions.  Textbooks  on  Roman 
law  show  us  that  by  the  time  of  Vespasian 
many  acts  had  been  passed  for  the  protection 
of  the  slave;  also  that  the  Antonines  improved 
matters  still  more.  And  by  the  time  of  Jus- 
tinian the  slave  question  was  no  longer  an 
issue.  Two  letters  of  Seneca  (47  and  70) 
represent  the  philosopher  as  protesting  against 
current  custom:  ''  I  am  glad  to  hear,  Lucilius, 
that  you  live  on  friendly  terms  with  your 
slaves;  .  .  .  they  are  our  friends,  nay,  rather, 
our  fellow-slaves,  because  Fortune  has  power 
over  us  no  less  than  over  them.  .  .  .  Let  them 
speak  freely  in  your  presence,  so  that  they 
may  not  gossip  behind  your  back.  ...  Do 
not  subject  them  to  humiliating  tasks.  Let 
them  dine  in  company  with  you.  .  .  .  Assume 
that  your  coachman  is  a  gentleman,  and  you 
will  make  him  one!  "  Seneca's  practice  evi- 
dently conformed  to  his  precept,  since  he 
allows  (83.4)  his  pace-maker  to  chaff  him  on 
his  "second  childhood."  And  among  the 
many  heroes  who  met  death  voluntarily,  in 
addition  to  the  Catos  and  admirals  and  gene- 

[71] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

rals,  there  was  a  poor  Doric  slave-boy  who 
dashed  his  head  against  a  wall,  and  a  German 
gladiator  who  discovered  a  grewsome  method 
of  exit  from  the  sordid  barracks  where  he  was 
incarcerated.  These  bits  of  protest  are  not 
limited  to  Seneca;  but  we  may  sum  up  his 
revolt  on  the  serf  question  by  contrasting  him 
with  such  genial  writers  as  the  Younger  Pliny, 
who  treat  their  slaves  like  spoiled  children, 
and  go  comfortably  about  their  business. 
Even  Epictetus  reflects  this  tendency.  Seneca 
is  the  most  outspoken  of  all. 

Feminism,  that  most  modern  of  all  modern 
topics,  offers  the  most  fruitful  field  for 
Seneca's  reform  ideas.  As  the  Eternal  City 
became  more  cosmopolitan,  woman  took  a 
prominent  part  as  dominatrix  of  the  salon,  as 
did  her  successor  in  eighteenth  century 
France.  The  result  of  it  all  in  high  life  was  a 
sort  of  cynical  compromise  in  her  relations 
with  man;  Seneca,  although  he  had  burned 
his  fingers  in  court  intrigue,  seems  to  have  been 
happy  in  his  two  marriages.  And  in  his  writ- 
ings he  takes  higher  ground  than  one  would 
expect  in  high  life  during  such  an  epoch.  His 
death  and  the  circumstances  of  his  death 
speak  volumes;  so  does  the  104th  Letter: 

[72] 


AND     HIS     MODERN    MESSAGE 

"  I  went  into  the  country  for  a  change  of  air, 
despite  the  reluctance  of  my  dear  Paulina; 
I  quoted  my  brother  Gallio's  words  —  that 
disease  is  a  matter  of  place  and  not  of  consti- 
tution —  for  Paulina  is  always  recommending 
me  to  guard  my  health.  Since  I  know  that 
our  souls  are  united,  I  take  care  of  her  by  tak- 
ing care  of  myself.  ...  A  man  who  does  not 
hold  his  wife  ...  in  high  enough  esteem  to 
remain  a  little  longer  in  this  world  for  her  sake, 
is  an  effeminate  laggard."  "  What  is  sweeter 
than  to  be  so  loved  by  one's  wife  that  one  is 
dearer  to  one's  own  self  for  this  very  reason?  " 

In  the  abstract,  we  find  several  statements 
of  a  new  viewpoint.  For  example:  "  How 
unreasonable  it  is  for  a  man  to  insist  on  con- 
jugal fidelity  in  his  wife,  and  at  the  same  time 
to  be  in  love  with  the  wives  of  other  men!  " 
Seneca  far  outdistances  other  Roman  writers 
in  his  championing  of  women;  Marcus  Aure- 
lius,  with  sad  eyes,  says  little,  for  he  was 
Faustina's  husband.  Epictetus  regards  a  wife 
and  children  as  so  much  baggage  which  must 
be  faithfully  checked.  Cicero  regards  women, 
(including  the  cross-grained  and  rheumatic 
Terentia)  as  necessary  evils,  excepting,  of 
course,    his    daughter    Tullia.      Even    Pliny, 

[73] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

with  his  charming  description  of  a  Roman 
girl,  with  his  shrewd  understanding  of  middle- 
aged  ladies  (including  his  mother-in-law),  and 
with  his  kindness  in  securing  husbands  for 
young  girls  whose  provinciality  has  perhaps 
scared  off  suitors,  takes  us  into  a  world  which 
resembles  "  Cranford,'^  where  no  one  does  any- 
thing unusual.  But  Seneca  burns  with  modern 
ideas.  Scribonia  jests  in  the  face  of  probable 
execution,  when  called  into  council  by  a  scape- 
grace nephew.  "  Why  trouble  yourself,"  says 
the  excellent  lady,  "  with  doing  what  others 
will  do  for  you?  "  Seneca  also  mentions  the 
famous  case  of  Sattia,  a  sort  of  female  Old 
Parr  in  Roman  legend.  Sattia  was  a  noble- 
woman who  lived  in  the  reign  of  Claudius  and 
whose  physician  left  orders  to  carve  on  his 
tomb  the  fact  that  he  had  doctored  the  with- 
ered dame  almost  to  the  bourne  of  a  hundred 
years.  "  You  see  that  some  persons  actually 
boast  about  their  age.  Now  who  could  have 
endured  the  old  lady's  remarks,  had  she  lived 
to  complete  her  century  of  existence?  " 

These  are  cases  from  the  aristocracy.  But 
the  wide  sympathy  of  Seneca  is  proved  by  his 
sympathetic  account  of  the  slave-woman  Har- 
paste.    "  You  are  aware,  of  course,  my  dear 

[74] 


AND     HIS     MODERN    MESSAGE 

Lucilius,  that  Harpaste,  my  wife's  female 
clown,  has  been  retained  in  my  household  as 
a  burden  from  a  legacy.  Personally,  I  hate  all 
these  freaks;  whenever  I  wish  to  enjoy  the 
quips  of  a  fool,  I  have  not  far  to  seek;  I  can 
laugh  at  myself.  Be  that  as  it  may,  my  fool 
suddenly  lost  her  eyesight.  The  story  sounds 
incredible,  but  it  is  true;  she  doesn't  know  that 
she  is  blind.  She  keeps  asking  her  attendant 
to  change  her  quarters,  says  that  the  house  is 
too  dark.  Now  what  amuses  us  in  the  case  of 
Harpaste  clearly  happens  to  all  the  rest  of  us; 
...  the  blind  seek  a  guide,  but  we  wander 
guideless  and  seek  excuses." 

There  is  on  the  one  side  a  serious  appeal 
for  the  rights  of  woman,  and  on  the  other  a 
half  humorous  understanding  of  feminine 
fancy.  Perhaps  the  facts  can  be  explained  by 
some  wondrous  mother-influence  (and  there 
is  evidence  in  Seneca's  other  works  to  support 
this  theory),  such  as  we  find  in  the  Muetter- 
chen  of  Goethe. 

Another  outspoken  word  is  that  which  deals 
with  the  gladiator-athlete.  Cicero  is  intellec- 
tually bored  with  the  games,  and  so  is  Pliny; 
but  Seneca  roundly  denounces  the  "  bleacher- 
ite."    "  Those  who  are  beefy  in  body  are  beefy 

[75] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

in  brains."  "  There  is  nothing  worse  than 
large  quantities  of  wine  poured  into  a  stomach 
fatigued  from  heavy  exercise."  Instead  of 
boxing  and  wrestling,  he  says,  try  jumping, 
cross-country  running,  and  dumb-bell  exer- 
cises. "  An  educated  man  is  a  fool  to  be 
always  thinking  of  enlarging  his  biceps;  .  .  . 
try  as  you  will,  you  can  never  grow  to  be  as 
strong  as  a  first-class  bull."  "  If  a  man's  body 
can  be  toughened  in  the  choking  dust  and 
under  the  blinding  sun,  why  cannot  the  mind 
also  be  trained  by  plain  living  and  high  think- 
ing? "  This  devotion  to  brainless  brawn 
befits,  he  declares,  neither  the  scholar  nor 
the  gentleman;  how  wise  was  that  gladiator 
who,  on  the  way  to  the  morning  exhibition, 
inserted  his  head  beween  the  chariot  spokes 
and  won  his  release!  Avoid  crowds!  They 
defile  you.  "  The  other  day  I  went  to  a  show; 
it  was  pure  manslaughter  instead  of  the  rest 
and  relaxation  which  I  expected.  '  Kill  him, 
lash  him,  brand  him!  '  cried  the  mob;  .  .  . 
^  Why  doesn't  he  die  game?  '  .  .  .  Do  you  not 
suppose  that  evil  sights  like  these  return  to 
plague  him  who  beholds  them?  "  Panem  et 
cir censes! 
The  eighty-third  letter  is  devoted  to  de- 

[76] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

nouncing  alcoholism.  We  note  with  amuse- 
ment how  Seneca  characteristically  begins  with 
a  syllogism  of  Zeno:  "  No  one  entrusts  a  secret 
to  a  drunken  man;  but  one  will  entrust  a  secret 
to  a  good  man ;  therefore  the  good  man  will  not 
get  drunk  "  ;  and  how  he  ridicules  this  logic 
by  framing  the  absurd:  "No  one  entrusts  a 
secret  to  a  man  asleep;  but  one  will  entrust  a 
secret  to  a  good  man;  therefore  the  good  man 
does  not  go  to  sleep."  He  concludes  that  it  is 
better  to  "  arraign  drunkenness  frankly  and  to 
expose  its  vices  .  .  .  show  that  drunkenness  is 
nothing  but  a  condition  of  insanity  purposely 
assumed.  .  .  .  Explain  by  facts,  and  not  mere 
words,  the  revolting  aspect  of  the  habit,  and 
its  haunting  evils."  Seneca  was  all  his  life  a 
teetotaller. 

We  have  thus  seen^^  how  far  thought  and 
human  sympathy  have  progressed  in  the  mind 
of  Seneca,  as  contrasted  with  Aristotle,  who 
deemed  a  slave  to  be  a  machine,  a  woman  to  be 
a  passive  link  between  two  generations,  and 
the  habits  of  man  in  general  to  be  controlled 
by  the  scheme  of  the  state  rather  than  by  the 
will  of  the  individual.  It  is  this  cumulative 
process  of  progressive  interest  in  his  fellow- 
men  that  makes  Seneca  attractive  in  the  eyes 

[77] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

of  Chaucer,  Thomas  a  Kempis,  and  Emerson. 
His  love  for  mankind  was  a  creed  rather  than 
a  platform. 

Before  proceeding  to  outline  further  the 
influence  of  this  versatile  Spanish  Roman  upon 
later  generations,  I  shall  quote  his  famous 
lines'^  upon  the  joy  of  reading:  "The  only 
men  in  the  world  who  are  really  at  leisure,  and 
really  living,  are  those  devoted  to  the  study  of 
wisdom.  Indeed,  they  are  not  only  guardians 
of  their  own  careers,  but  they  are  adding  all 
eternity  to  their  store;  whatever  years  have 
gone  before  them,  are  to  be  counted  as  their 
property.  And  unless  we  are  most  unappreci- 
ative,  those  noble  pioneers  in  high  thinking 
were  bom  for  our  benefit  and  fashioned  their 
lives  for  our  sakes.  We  are  brought  to  con- 
sider things  of  the  greatest  worth  which  have 
been  dug  up  from  darkness  into  daylight  by 
the  effort  of  others;  to  no  period  of  history 
are  we  forbidden  access,  and  we  are  admitted 
everywhere.  If  by  greatness  of  soul  we  may 
pass  beyond  the  narrow  confines  of  human 
frailty,  we  have  unlimited  time  through  which 
we  may  course.  We  may  share  in  the  thoughts 
of  all  philosophers.  And  since  the  universe 
allows  us  to  go  into  partnership  with  all  the 

[78] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

ages,  why,  in  this  tiny  and  fleeting  state  of 
transition  should  we  not  give  ourselves  whole- 
heartedly to  the  things  which  are  unbounded, 
eternal,  and  to  be  shared  with  our  betters?  .  .  . 
Shall  we  not  say  that  men  are  engaged  upon 
real  duties  who  wish  to  be  on  the  most  inti- 
mate terms  with  the  thinkers  of  past  ages? 
Every  one  of  these  will  give  you  his  attention; 
every  one  of  these  will  send  you  away  happier 
and  more  devoted;  no  one  of  them  will  allow 
you  to  depart  empty-handed  from  his  presence. 
They  can  be  found  by  night  or  by  day,  and 
by  anyone  who  wishes. 

"  None  of  them  will  compel  you  to  die,  and 
yet  all  of  them  can  teach  you  how  to  die. 
None  will  wear  your  life  out,  but  will  give  their 
own  lives  to  you.  It  will  not  harm  you  to 
chat  with  them,  nor  will  their  friendship  mean 
death  to  you  or  their  association  expense  to 
you.  Gifts  they  will  give  you, —  whatever  you 
will;  they  will  not  be  responsible  for  your 
satisfaction  being  less  than  your  craving. 
What  happiness  and  what  a  noble  old  age 
abides  for  one  who  has  given  himself  into  their 
patronage!  He  will  have  friends  with  whom 
to  converse  on  things  small  or  great,  whom  he 
may  call  into  council  daily,  from  whom  he  may 

[79] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

hear  the  truth  without  insult,  praise  without 
flattery,  according  to  whose  image  he  may 
pattern  himself. 

"  These  souls  will  show  you  the  path  to 
immortality  and  will  raise  you  to  heights  from 
which  no  one  is  cast  down.  .  .  .  Anything  will 
be  destroyed  by  the  flight  of  time;  but  harm 
can  never  come  to  that  which  wisdom  has 
hallowed." 

How  much  like  Southey's 

"  The  mighty  minds  of  old, 
My  never- failing  friends  are  they, 
With  whom  I  converse  day  by  day/  " 

It  is  therefore  on  grounds  of  great  sym- 
pathy, as  well  as  through  resemblance  to 
Christian  sentiments,  that  the  church  embraced 
Seneca.  He  had  approached  the  theme  of  sin 
and  suffering  and  righteousness  in  a  more 
human  spirit  than  Cicero's  sages  or  indeed 
than  any  leader  of  previous  pagan  philosophy 
and  religion,  save  only  Socrates. 


[80] 


IV.   HOW   HE   TOUCHED   THE 
MEDIEVAL    MIND 

CHRISTIANITY, therefore,  placed  Sen- 
eca on  a  firmer  foundation.  He  had 
caught  up  with  the  currents  of  thought 
which  his  Roman  contemporaries  found  for- 
eign to  their  ideals.  With  this  tradition  of 
respect  there  is  now  intermingled  the  admira- 
tion of  medieval  scholars,  theologians,  and 
people  of  affairs.  And  be  it  remembered  that 
most  of  the  people  of  affairs  in  these  centuries 
were  churchmen.  The  prevalence  of  ninth  and 
tenth  century  manuscripts  of  Seneca  alone 
would  indicate  special  interest  throughout  this 
period, —  in  addition  to  the  commonplace 
books  called  "  Seneks "  which  we  shall  see 
later  cropping  out  in  Chaucer.  The  name 
''  Senek "  is  formed  on  the  analogy  of  the 
grammars  known  as  "Donets "  (Donatus), 
named  from  the  first  authority  who  wrote  on 
the  subject.  We  find  also  "  Monita"  "  Libri 
de  MoribuSy*  '' Senecae  proverbia/'  —  gath- 
ered, in  several  cases,  before  the  eighth 
[8i] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

century  and  serving  for  many  a  medieval  quo- 
tation, often  without  acknowledgment.  They 
become  typical  "  hand-me-downs ''  of  a  pro- 
verbial nature, —  accretions  like  a  collection  of 
ballads  or  like  a  Joe-Miller  jest-book  or  the 
Till  Eulenspiegel  literature  in  Germany. 

Seneca  thus  becomes  no  less  honored  for 
his  literary  qualities  than  for  his  spiritual 
inspiration.  Hildebert,  writing  to  Henry  I, 
mentions  him;  Gerbert,  in  the  tenth  century, 
refers  to  him;  the  correspondence  between 
Abelard  and  Heloise  opens  with  the  famous 
saying  of  our  philosopher:  "You  must  not 
limit  your  study  of  philosophy  to  your  leisure 
moments "  ;  and  Alanus  de  Insulis,^*  that 
purple  patcher  of  homily  and  imagery,  lineal 
descendant  of  Martianus  Capella  and  the 
school  of  allegory,  is  replete  with  Seneca's 
words  and  thoughts.  Alanus  combines  the 
pagan  allegory  with  the  ingredients  of  Christi- 
anity, as  Seneca  himself  puts  a  touch  of  mystic 
monotheism  into  the  Stoic  framework;  coming 
together  from  opposite  directions  they  reach 
the  same  point  of  view.  Wisdom  is  invoked  in 
the  Senecan  manner;  Epictetus  and  Aurelius 
have  less  of  the  medieval  touch.  The  four 
pagan  virtues  are  enlarged  by  the  addition  of 
[82] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Chastity  and  Generosity  and  others  of  the 
goodly  galaxy  whom  we  see  playing  a  part  in 
great  literature  down  through  Spenser's  Faerie 
Queene.  The  De  Planctu  Naturae  is  full  of 
"  the  transgression  of  the  earthly  sphere,  the 
disorders  in  the  ordering  of  the  world, 
the  carelessness  of  government,  the  unjust- 
ness  of  law,"  —  harangues  resembling  the 
passages  on  mundane  sin  which  fill  the 
Epistles  and  the  Natural  History  of  Seneca. 
"  The  world  grows  worse,  and  now  its  golden 
age  departs  "  ;  "  the  wretch  has  nothing  when 
he  thinks  that  he  has  nothing,  since  his  long- 
ings balance  his  riches  with  poverty."  "  By 
this  pest  and  plague  of  flattery  are  smitten 
those  .  .  .  who  offer  lulling  praises  to  the 
hearing  of  prelates;  who  either  shake  from  the 
coats  of  such  men  a  fictitious  dust,  or  pretend 
to  pick  a  feather  off  a  featherless  garment." 
"  There  Cato  was  intoxicated  with  the  golden 
nectar  of  virtuous  sobriety;  Plato  shone  with 
the  sidereal  splendor  of  genius."  The  style  and 
the  thoughts  here  given  show  how  little  the 
"  point "  of  Silver  Latin  rhetoric  had  lost  its 
sting,  and  how  near  in  sympathy  these  Chris- 
tian scholars  were  to  the  author  of  the  words: 
"  Avarice  .  .  .  made  all  things  the  property 

C83] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

of  Others,  and  reduced  itself  from  boundless 
wealth  to  straitened  need.  It  was  avarice 
that  introduced  poverty  and,  by  craving  much, 
lost  all." 

The  Naturales  Quaestiones  becomes  the 
standard  work  of  the  Middle  Ages  on  tides, 
earthquakes,  and  comets;  it  is  the  more 
advanced  counterpart  of  the  Physiologic — the 
schoolbooks  on  obvious  animal  life  which 
pointed  a  moral  for  convent  classes.  John 
Scotus  Erigena,  Amaury  of  Bene,  Otto  of 
Freising,  Giraldus  Cambrensis,  and  Peter  of 
Blois,  all  refer  to  Seneca  as  scientist  and  phi- 
losopher. So  does  Vincent  of  Beauvais,^^  in 
many  passages  of  his  Mirror  of  Nature. 

Giraldus  the  Welshman  invokes  him,  espe- 
cially in  the  Itinerary  Through  Wales.  In  the 
third  chapter  he  is  attacking  the  Cistercians 
who  degenerated  into  luxurious  ways.  "  As 
Seneca  says,  '  Too  great  happiness  makes  men 
greedy,  nor  are  their  desires  ever  so  temperate 
as  to  terminate  in  what  is  acquired.' "  And 
in  the  fifth  chapter  likewise:  "  Seneca  says, 
'  He  falls  not  badly  who  rises  stronger  from 
his  fall,'  " — ^with  reference  to  the  humbling  and 
subsequent  promotion  of  an  abbot.  Again, 
"  Hence  the  observation  of  Seneca  that  the 

[84] 


AND    HIS    MODERN    MESSAGE 

malicious  attention  of  the  envious  reader  dwells 
with  no  less  satisfaction  on  a  faulty  than  on  an 
elegant  expression,  and  is  as  anxious  to  dis- 
cover what  it  may  ridicule  as  what  it  may 
commend."  Bernard  of  Clairvaux  takes  from 
the  20th  Epistle  a  motto  for  the  Crusades: 
"When  this  throng  shall  cease  being  fed  by 
thee,  it  will  feed  itself  .  .  .  the  forsakers  of 
the  throng  will  be  those  who  followed,  not  thee, 
but  some  other  guiding  star."  Bernard  is 
simply  continuing  the  policy  set  by  the  Church, 
of  amalgamating  its  own  thought-processes 
with  those  of  such  predecessors  as  this  Empire 
philosopher;  the  other  writers  mentioned  are 
touched  by  his  philosophic  and  literary  appeal. 
The  wizards  also  follow  Seneca.  Roger 
Bacon,  master  of  the  thirteenth  century,  while 
speculating  in  his  Opus  Majus  on  geography, 
harks  back  to  the  Naturales  Quaestiones  as 
"  repeating  Aristotle's  ideas  of  the  proximity 
of  Spain  and  India."  Bacon  regards  him  as 
peer  among  classical  authors;  he  quotes  him 
often.  And  he  records  a  search  for  his  works, 
carried  on  for  twenty  years,  amid  forbidding 
surroundings,  together  with  those  of  "  Aris- 
totle, Avicenna,  Cicero,  and  other  ancients," 
whose  writings  are  no  less  difficult  to  purchase. 

[85] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

John  of  Salisbury  adopts  the  proverb  of  the 
Pinching  Shoe,  which  branches  off  from  Sen- 
eca's De  Matrimonio  through  Jerome.  And  he 
also  comes  to  the  defence  of  Seneca  in  answer 
to  QuintiHan:  "If  Quintilian  will  excuse  my 
saying  so,  there  are  very  few,  if  any,  writers  on 
conduct  among  non-Christians  whose  words 
and  ideas  can  be  more  readily  applied  to  all 
kinds  of  practical  things."  ^^ 

Grosseteste,^^  the  contemporary  of  Bacon, 
quotes  away;  but  anyone  can  quote;  Grosse- 
teste  stands  out  interestingly  as  the  author  of 
Christian  phrase-books  modelled  on  the  Ro- 
man; they  are  Dicta,  with  sub-topics  such  as 
Patience, —  the  Christian  counterpart  of  all 
the  moralizing  which  made  Seneca  so  popular 
during  this  era.  Grosseteste  remarks  also  that 
he  hesitated  about  journeying  to  Rome,  but 
that  he  went  ahead  because  he  refused  to  be 
numbered  with  men  who  are  "  tossed  about 
with  every  wind  of  doctrine,"  or  "  with  the 
swimmers  of  whom  Seneca  says  that  they  are 
carried  along  by  the  current."  It  is  also  inter- 
esting to  note  that  Johannes  de  Garlandia  in 
a  literary  history  (13th  century)  includes 
Seneca  among  the  Latin  authors  to  be  read. 
These  admirers  of  his  knew  him  as  the 
[86] 


AND     HIS     MODteRN     MES^SAGE 

writer  of  the  Epistles,  Naturales  Quaestiones, 
De  Beneficiis,  Tragedies,  and  the  Declama- 
tions, wrongly  ascribing  the  Elder  Seneca's 
work  on  rhetoric  to  the  son.  It  was  not  until 
Raphael  of  Volaterra  and  Lipsius  that  this 
error  was  rectified.  These  names  are  among 
the  most  important  of  their  time,  and  we  may 
properly,  before  reaching  Dante,  close  with  a 
comparison  made  by  Thomas  Aquinas,  who 
couples  Seneca's  "  it  is  indeed  excess  to  know 
more  than  one  needs "  with  Augustine's 
"  overdone  craving  is  cloaked  under  the  name 
of  learning  and  science."  But  measure  was 
never  a  virtue  in  the  Middle  Ages. 


[87] 


V.   HOW   THE   RENAISSANCE 
VIEWED   HIM 

DID  DANTE,  having  all  the  Flori- 
legia  and  Dicta  Philosophorum  at 
his  command,  go  to  the  original 
works  of  Seneca,  preferring,  with  his  penetrat- 
ing intellect,  not  to  trust  to  such  "  elegant 
extracts  "  ?  It  is  safe  to  agree  with  Professor 
E.  Moore  ^^  that  he  did  so.  Dante's  tempera- 
ment was  not  one  that  took  things  at  second 
hand. 

In  the  First  Circle  of  the  Inferno  were 
"  souls  with  sedate  and  placid  eyes,"  "  glorious 
spirits  in  august  array,"  and  among  them 
were  the  Greek  heroes  and  philosophers, 

"  V^ith  Orpheus,  Zeno,  and  Hippocrates, 
Ttdlius,  Linm,  Seneca  —  " 

men  who  are  shut  out  from  perfect  rewards 
only  through  the  lack  of  Christianity.  This 
is  their  sole  bar  to  complete  immortality;  and 
Dante  shows  himself  perhaps  even  stricter  in 
[88] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

this  regard  than  the  Fathers  of  the  Church. 
Seneca's  Letters  are  the  medium  of  his  renown, 
and  it  is  through  them  that  he  is  chiefly 
known  during  this  period.  Dante  quotes  or 
clearly  reflects  Seneca  more  than  a  dozen 
times;  and  sometimes  even  improves  upon  his 
original  in  force  and  point.  His  scholarship 
is  fairly  accurate;  there  existed  even  in  his  day 
a  learned  doubt  as  to  the  identity  of  Seneca 
the  Moralist  and  Seneca  the  Tragic  Poet. 

In  the  Convito  occur  the  words:  "perche 
dice  Seneca:  *  che  nulla  cosa  piu  cara  si  com- 
pera,  che  quella  dove  i  prieghi  si  spendono/  " 
—  a  frequent  theme  in  the  Latin  philosopher, 
as  in  the  famous  tenth  satire  of  Juvenal.  In 
the  76th  Letter  Seneca  advises  men  to  keep 
on  learning  "  as  long  as  they  are  ignorant, 
or,  in  the  words  of  the  proverb,  as  long  as 
they  are  alive," —  which  Dante  abbreviates 
incisively  to:  "  Se  V  uno  de'  piedi  avessi  nel 
sepolcro,  apprendere  vorrei."  Yet  a  saying 
of  the  Jurist  Salvius  Julianus  keeps  the  "  foot- 
in- the-grave  "  metaphor  more  closely  than 
Seneca's  proverb.  Dante  also  has  a  fellow- 
feeling  with  Seneca  regarding  the  ostentation 
of  riches:  ^'quanto  contra  richezza  Seneca, 
massimamente  a  Lucillo  scrivendo,"  —  which 

[  89  ] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

is  reflected  from  many  a  harangue  in  the 
^Epistles  and  the  Natural  History.  Finally, 
Dante  has  a  passage  on  meteors  from  the 
Natural  History ^  perhaps  filtered  through  the 
work  of  Albertus  Magnus. 

As  Dante  did  a  service  to  Seneca's  memory 
in  Italy,  so  Chaucer  established  him  as  a 
literary  and  philosophical  authority  in  Eng- 
land. Chaucer's  classical  affiliations  have  been 
carefully  studied;  we  know  that  he  brought 
Virgil  and  Ovid  and  Statins  and  Boethius  into 
the  limelight  of  cultivated  England.  With 
them  came  Seneca;  biit  from  what  sources? 
Was  it  from  "  Seneks "  or  commonplace 
books?  Was  it  direct  from  manuscripts?  Or 
was  it  from  a  combination  of  the  two? 

Piers  Plowman,  in  upholding  communism  as 
a  panacea,  "  proves  it  by  Seneca."  Professor 
Ayres  is  justified  in  assuming  a  much  greater 
influence  than  mere  "  elegant  extracts  "  such  as 
those  which  we  have  mentioned  above.  And 
it  is  significant  that  by  his  time  the  spurious 
Pauline  correspondence  seems  to  be  making 
less  and  less  of  an  impression. 

Chaucer  ^^  refers  to  '^  Senecciens  "  as  well 
as  to  "  Seneks."  These  followers,  or  members 
of  a  school,  or  modern  lovers  of  Seneca  are 

[90] 


AND    HIS     MODERN    MESSAGE 

mentioned  in  the  Boece:  "  The  Senecciens  and 
the  Canios  and  the  Sorans,  of  which  folke  the 
renown  is  neither  over-olde  ne  unsolempne." 
As  Seneca  had  his  Cato-cult, —  the  worship  of 
the  t)^ical  Roman  Stoic  hero, —  so  later  gen- 
erations seem  to  have  developed  a  Seneca-cult. 
The  Monk's  Tale  contains  an  extended  ac- 
count of  Nero's  tutordom  at  the  hands  of 
Seneca : 

"  In  yowthe  a  maister  hadde  this  emperour, 
To  teche  hym  letterure  and  curteysie, — 
¥or  of  moralitee  he  was  the  flour, 
As  in  his  tyme,  but  if  bookes  lye; 

This  Seneca,  of  which  that  I  devyse, 

By-cause  that  Nero  hadde  of  him  swich  drede, 

For  he  fro  vices  wolde  hym  ay  chastise 

T>iscreetly,  as  by  word,  and  nat  by  dede; 

*  S/re/  wolde  he  seyn,  '  an  emperour  moot  nede 

Be  vertuous  and  hate  tirannye; ' 

For  which  he  in  a  bath  made  hym  to  blede 

On  both  his  armes,  til  he  moste  dye  J* 

It  is  thus  a  literary  as  well  as  a  historical 
commonplace  that  the  Ministre  Malgre  Lui 
should  be  hailed  as  the  classical  example  of 
ruling  under  difficulties  and  of  controlling  the 

[91] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

many-headed  beast  of  Imperial  Rome.  Cal- 
vin's commentary,  for  example,  on  Seneca's 
De  dementia  in  1532  reflects  the  attempt  on 
the  part  of  a  thoughtful  scholar  to  influence  a 
monarch  towards  tolerance  (in  this  case  of  the 
Protestants) ;  and  the  whole  career,  with  many 
of  his  speeches  and  sermons,  of  Bossuet,  was 
an  endeavor  to  create  in  the  Dauphin  an  atti- 
tude of  clemency  towards  those  in  lower 
places  and  in  higher  realms  of  thought.  The 
proverbial  philosopher-king  thus  came  near 
becoming  historic  fact;  and  the  ideal  of  Seneca 
manifested  itself  in  later  generations.  It  is 
also  significant  of  the  Roman's  prominence  at 
this  time  that  in  Chaucer's  Parson's  Tale  our 
philosopher  is  classed  with  Augustine,  Solo- 
mon, and  St.  Paul. 

The  Melibeus  predominates  in  references 
from  Seneca,  even  though  Albertanus  of  Bres- 
cia is  the  middleman  for  their  circulation. 
The  Latin  original,  dating  from  the  thirteenth 
century,  may  or  may  not  have  been  Chaucer's 
source;  at  all  events,  we  find  therein  about 
twenty  saws  which  go  back  to  Seneca  —  the 
larger  portion  from  the  63  rd  Letter.  Perhaps 
less  than  half  of  them  are  direct,  all  the  others 
deriving  from  some  commonplace  book.    It  is 

[92] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

noteworthy  that  Albertanus'  genuine  loans  are 
drawn  from  the  Epistles. 

A  passage  in  the  Parson's  Tale  (I.  759): 
"  And  therefore  seith  Seneca:  *  thy  prudence 
sholde  live  benignly  with  thy  thralles,'  "  may 
be  compared  to  the  kernel  of  the  47th  Letter: 
familiariter  te  cum  servis  vivere.  The  whole 
Chaucerian  theme  is  so  consecutive,  when  laid 
alongside  the  Latin,  that  steady  reading  in  the 
original  seems  to  have  taken  place,  rather  than 
mere  picking  out  of  isolated  topics  from  a 
handbook  of  extracts. 

The  Pardoner,  that  winning  rascal,  dis- 
courses most  eloquently  against  drunkenness 
and  gluttony:   (c.  492ff): 

"  Senek  seith  eke  a  good  word  douteless; 
He  seith  he  can  no  difference  fynde 
Betwix  a  man  that  is  out  of  his  mynde 
hnd  a  man  which  that  is  dronkelewe; 
But  that  woodnesse,  fallen  in  a  shrewe, 
Versevereth  lenger  than  doth  dronkennesse" 

This  may  be  laid  alongside  a  passage  from 
the  83rd  Letter:  ^' To  be  drunk  is  nothing 
else  than  to  be  crazy  on  purpose;  for  if  you 
continue  the  habit  of  intoxication  for  several 
days,  can  you  entertain  any  doubt  about  your 

[93] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

madness?  Even  now,  it  is  shorter,  but  not  any 
less  intense." 

"  Thise  cokes,  how  they  stampe,  and  streyne,  and 
grinde, 
And  turnen  substance  into  accident, 
To  fulfille  at  thy  likerous  talent!" 

may  be  directly  taken  from  Seneca's  "  Behold 
these  kitchens  of  ours,  with  the  cooks  bustling 
about  from  stove  to  stove!  Do  you  think  that 
it  can  be  for  one  stomach  alone  that  this  food  is 
being  prepared  with  so  much  turmoil? " 
Again,  it  must  have  been  from  more  than  a 
mere  book  of  sayings  that  the  Man  of  Law 
(B  20-28)  derived  his  remarks  on  Time: 

"  We/  can  Senek,  and  many  a  philosophre 
Bewailen  tyme,  more  than  gold  in  cofre. 
^  For  los  of  catel  may  recovered  be, 
But  los  of  tyme  shendeth  us!  quod  he" 

For  this,  Chaucer  must  have  read  consecu- 
tively in  the  first  Epistle,  which  says:  "So 
great  is  the  folly  of  mankind,  that  they  allow 
the  cheapest  and  most  useless  things,  which 
can  easily  be  replaced,  to  be  charged  in  the 
reckoning,  .  .  .  but  they  never  regard  them- 

[94] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

selves  as  in  debt  when  they  have  received  some 
of  that  precious  commodity,  time!  " 

Finally,  the  Canterbury  Tales  afford  us  one 
more  direct  and  clear  comparison,  in  the  WifiB 
of  Bath's  remarks  upon  the  simple  life: 

"  Glad  poverte  is  an  honest  thing,  certeyn; 
Thus  wol  Senek  and  other  clerkes  sayn. 
Whoso  that  halt  him  payd  of  his  poverte, 
I  holde  him  riche,  at  had  he  nat  a  sherte. 
He  that  coveyteth  is  a  poor  wight. 
For  he  wolde  have  that  is  not  in  his  might. 
But  he  that  noghte  hath,  ne  coveyteth  have, 
Is  riche,  al-though  ye  holde  him  but  a  knave." 
(D.  1183-90) 

This  follows  without  question  the  thought  of 
the  second  Letter:  "  Glad  poverty  is  an  honor- 
able estate,  says  Epicurus.  Now  it  is  not 
poverty  if  it  is  glad.  For  the  man  of  poverty 
is  one  who  craves  too  much,  rather  than  one 
who  has  too  little." 

There  remains  the  Troilus,  with  its  shrewd 
moralizing  and  its  well-sutured  anachronisms. 
Boccaccio's  Pandaro  is  converted  into  Chau- 
cer's Pandarus  by  the  aid  of  many  wise  saws 
'from  Seneca,  unacknowledged,  as  is  the  case 
throughout  the  Troilus. 

[95] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

*'  hnd  witeth  wel,  that  bothe  two  ben  vyces, 
Mistrusten  alle,  or  elles  alle  leve"  (I.  687) 

has  its  origin  in  Epistle  III :  "  both  are  vices, 
trusting  everyone  and  trusting  no  one.^*    Again, 

"  Delyte  not  in  wo  thy  wo  to  seche,**  (I.  704) 

echoes  from  the  99th  Epistle:  "  What  is  more 
shameful  than  to  catch  at  pleasure  in  the  very 
midst  of  pain.'"    Compare  also 

"  For  certeinly,  the  first  poynt  is  this 
0/  noble  courage  and  of  wel  ordeyne, 
A  man  to  have  pees  with  himself ^  y-wis;" 

and  (Ep.  2.1)  "The  first  proof  of  a  well- 
ordered  mind  is  to  be  able  to  pause  and  linger 
within  itself." 

We  are  perhaps  back  again  in  the  common- 
place book  atmosphere  when  we  compare  short 
bits  like 

"  He  that  parted  is  in  evry  place 
Is  no-wher  hoot,  as  writen  clerkes  wyse  "  (I.  960), 

with  the  neat  "  everywhere  means  nowhere  " 
of  the  second  Letter,  or  even  when  the  passage  * 
on  the  inadvisability  of  transplanting  (I.  964) 

[96] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

is  set  alongside  of  "A  plant  which  is  often 
moved  can   never  grow  strong"    (Ep.   2.3). 

In  all  these  cases  we  are  on  delicate  ground 
if  we  insist  on  direct  connection  with  the  works 
of  Seneca.  We  must  remember,  for  example, 
that  the  Physician's  Tale  came  to  Chaucer 
from  Livy  through  the  Romaunt  of  the  Rose, 
that  the  handbooks  were  full  of  "  Seneks," 
and  that  many  a  continental  author  like 
Albertanus  of  Brescia  served  as  a  clearing- 
house for  the  English  master,  as  he  did  for 
others.  But  we  possess  enough  of  a  residuum 
to  decide,  with  Professor  Ayres,  that  Seneca 
must  have,  in  certain  parts  at  least,  been 
familiar  to  Chaucer  per  se  and  in  his  own 
works. 

Dante,  then,  had  a  bowing  acquaintance  with 
Seneca;  Chaucer  used  him  still  more;  but 
Petrarch,^^  the  guide-post  of  the  Renaissance, 
the  "  first  modern  man,"  the  pioneer  humanist 
to  whom  all  the  literary  tribe  are  so  deeply  in 
debt,  made  him  a  very  part  of  his  mind  and 
soul.  Seneca  comes  second  only  to  Virgil  in 
the  number  of  quotations.  The  first  library 
at  Vaucluse  contained  two  copies  oi  Ad  Lucil- 
lium.  The  catalogue  of  the  library,  too,  drew 
its  motto  from  the  second  Epistle  of  Seneca: 

[97] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

"  non  transfuga  sed  explorator  transire  soleo," 
to  which  Petrarch  prefixed  his  own  phrase: 
^^  peculiares  ad  religionem."  Again,  Petrarch^s 
epistolary  style  was  modelled  upon  that  of 
Seneca  rather  than  upon  that  of  Cicero;  since 
the  works  of  the  latter  did  not  come  into  his 
ken  until  his  forty-first  year,  and  by  that 
time  his  style  was  formed.  Pliny,  of  course, 
was  a  sealed  book  to  him.  Petrarch  wished 
to  leave  behind  him  a  collection  of  letters 
resembling  the  Latin  master ^s  or  such  as  those 
of  Abelard.  Many  of  Petrarch's  letters  are 
built  like  Seneca's,  and  so  it  is  with  the  essays 
also.  In  the  De  Remediis,  the  architecture 
is  in  many  instances  parallel:  the  essay  opens 
with  such  concrete  description  as  that  of  the 
palaestra,  and  goes  on  to  draw  the  moral, — 
how  much  better  it  is  not  to  contend  for 
human  prizes,  but  for  the  Great  Olympic  of 
Life.  Petrarch,  as  he  grows  older,  inclines 
towards  Cicero :  "  I  recollect  that  Seneca 
laughed  at  Cicero  for  including  trivial  matters 
in  his  letters,  and  yet  I  am  much  more  prone 
in  my  epistles  to  follow  Cicero's  example  than 
Seneca's.  Seneca,  indeed,  gathered  into  "his 
letters  pretty  much  all  the  moral  reflections 
which  he  had  published  in  his  various  books; 

[98] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Cicero,  on  the  other  hand,  treats  philosophical 
subjects  in  his  books,  but  fills  his  letters  with 
miscellaneous  news  and  the  gossip  of  the  day. 
Let  Seneca  think  as  he  likes  about  this;  as  for 
me,  I  must  confess  that  I  find  Cicero's  letters 
very  agreeable  reading.  They  relax  the  ten- 
sion produced  by  weighty  matters."  This  is 
true;  but  Petrarch's  Epistles ^  which  are,  like 
Seneca's  own,  carefully  elaborated  essays,  do 
not  resemble  the  fact-packed  correspondence 
of  the  master  of  Roman  oratory  so  much  as  the 
discourses  of  Seneca  to  Lucilius, —  each  revolv- 
ing about  a  point,  and  each  concentrated 
until  the  subject  is  exhausted. 

We  may  prove  this  by  quoting  at  length  a 
passage  from  Petrarch's  De  Remediis  Utrius- 
que  Fortunae  (II.  29)  on  Slaves:  "  nota  sunt 
.  .  .  hac  in  re  Senecae  consilia, —  vivendum 
cum  servis  familiariter,  comiter,  clementer: 
familiarem  esse  iubet  .  .  .  addit  non  verberum 
sed  verborum  castigatione  utendum  .  .  .  ad- 
mittendos  praeterea  in  sermonem,  in  consilium, 
in  convictum,  ...  in  servo  verum  opinatur 
quod  iam  ante  de  amico  dixerat.  Fidelem  si 
credideris,  fades." 

In  a  Letter  to  Seneca,  furthermore,  he  shows 
that  the  content,  as  well  as  the  style,  of  that 

[  99  ] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

author  was  peculiarly  congenial  to  him:  "  In 
one  department  of  learning,  however,  he  did 
not  blush  to  acknowledge  that  the  genius  of 
the  Greeks  was  distinctly  inferior,  saying  that 
he  knew  not  whom  to  place  on  a  par  with 
thee  in  the  field  of  moral  philosophy."  Quota- 
tions are  so  numerous  that  it  is  futile  and  pe- 
dantic to  heap  them  up.  Petrarch's  love  for  Sen- 
eca is  proved  most  conclusively  of  all  by  his 
recording  in  his  copy  of  Virgil  along  with  the 
date  of  Laura's  death,  the  passage  from  the 
86th  Epistle:  "  the  soul  of  her,  as  Seneca  says 
of  Africanus,  I  am  fully  persuaded  to  have  re- 
turned to  the  heaven  whence  it  came." 
Petrarch  thus  enshrouds  in  a  passage  from  a 
well-loved  author  the  memory  of  his  own  best- 
beloved. 

Perhaps  the  clearest  proof  of  all  that  our 
philosopher  made  a  fundamental  appeal  to  the 
Middle  Ages  and  the  early  Renaissance  is  the 
fact  that  the  University  of  Piacenza  possessed 
a  Professor  of  Seneca!  This  put  him  on  a  par 
with  the  study  of  Aristotle  at  the  University 
of  Paris. 

Thomas  a  Kempis,  that  wondrously  elusive 
and  haunting  mystic  whose  Imitation  has 
drawn  the  essence  of  the  flower  of  quietism, 

[lOO] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     M^SSA^Qli     \il 

refers  at  length  to  the  7th  Epistle  ("  On 
Crowds  ") :  "  One  saith:  ^  As  oft  as  I  have  gone 
among  men,  I  returned  home  less  a  man.' " 
It  seems  entirely  possible  that  the  author  may 
have  used  the  direct  works  of  Seneca,  instead 
of  quoting  "  loosely,  from  a  commonplace 
book,"  as  Dr.  Bigg,  the  editor,  remarks.  This 
inspired  writer  of  Biblical  centos  has  much  in 
common  with  Seneca;  a  quietist  himself,  a 
practical  reformer  as  well  as  leader  in  a  pro- 
fessed denominational  brotherhood,  he  has  the 
same  attitude  towards  the  world's  bustle  and 
the  distractions  of  mankind.  ..."  Bear  thy- 
self as  an  exile  and  pilgrim  upon  earth  .  .  . 
the  habit  and  shaven  crown  do  little  profit; 
but  change  of  manners  and  perfect  mortifi- 
cation of  passions  make  a  true  religious 
man  "  ;  "I  teach  without  fence  of  logic  "  ; 
"What  have  I  to  do  with  genera  and  spe- 
cies? "  "In  the  morning  purpose,  and  at 
night  examine  thy  manners,  how  thou  hast  be- 
haved thyself  this  day  in  word,  deed,  and 
thought;  for  in  these  perhaps  thou  hast  often 
offended  both  God  and  thy  neighbor."  Identi- 
cally such  thoughts  and  musings,  while  not 
incontrovertibly  Senecan,  are  found  in  the 
Latin  philosopher.    To  a  marked  degree  these 

[lOl] 


»  '  »   » 


;.,;'!. I 


'\'[l]    '«sXnec:a   the  philosopher 

two  thinkers  feel  the  "  mystery  of  this  unin- 
telligible world." 

Soon  after  this  time  begins  the  age  of  edi- 
tions. Just  as  the  ninth  and  tenth  centuries 
were  the  heyday  of  MSS.,  so  in  1475  began  a 
far  larger  diffusion  through  the  press.  The  first 
printed  Seneca  appeared  at  Naples  in  that 
year;  the  first  edition  is  by  Erasmus  in  151 5, 
followed  by  a  second  in  1529.  Froude  tells  us 
that  in  October  1516,  Erasmus  "writes  from 
Brussels  to  Peter  Giles  ...  in  fraternal  good 
humour,  advising  him  to  be  regular  at  his 
work,  to  keep  a  journal,  to  remember  that  life 
was  short,  to  study  Plato  and  Seneca,  love  his 
wife,  and  disregard  the  world's  opinion." 
The  swift  and  pithy  thoughts  of  Seneca  always 
appealed  to  Erasmus:  "The  lynx  can  see 
farther  than  you  can;  the  swans  surpass  you 
in  colour  and  beauty,  but  only  man  can  appre- 
ciate the  pity  of  God."  Calvin  a  few  years 
later  turned  out  a  De  dementia.  Pincianus 
produced  another  edition  in  1536;  and  the 
climax  of  scholarly  attention  came  with  the 
monumental  volumes  of  Lipsius  in  1605  and 
the  English  translation  by  the  Elizabethan 
Thomas  Lodge  in  1614.  Golding  in  1577  had 
translated  the  De  Beneficiis;  and  Lipsius  him- 
[  102  ] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE    ;5,',    ^, 

self  "  made  for  a  style  founded  on  Tacitus  and 
Seneca,"  —  an  innovation  which  caused  some 
discussion  in  literary  and  scholarly  circles. 
From  the  late  15th  century,  therefore,  we  may 
say  that  our  philosopher  circulated  freely  in 
Europe  and  that  from  this  time  onward  his 
influence  became  much  wider,  cropping  out  in 
all  sorts  of  unimagined  places  and  under 
unexpected  circumstances. 

Alexander  Barclay,  who  flourished  at  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century,  perpe- 
trated a  translation  of  Sebastian  Brandt's  Nar- 
renschiff,  "  The  Ship  of  Fooles,"  a  curious 
moralizing  poem,  typical  in  its  character- 
drawing, —  in  which  a  sort  of  Theophrastian 
Noah's  Ark  is  catalogued  and  described.  Such 
diatribes  as  this  by  Barclay  against  luxury, 
replete  with  Seneca,  Juvenal,  Plutarch,  Ovid, 
and  other  classical  authors,  had  floated  down 
the  Middle  Ages  to  the  Renaissance  on  many 
an  alien  craft: 

"  Where  is  Curius  and  abstynence  soverayne, 
Where  is  old  Persemony  wont  to  be  so  gode? 
Where  is  the  old  measure  of  mannys  life  and 
fode?" 

[103] 


..;;•.     flR'NECA    THE    PHELOSOPHER 

In  the  course  of  the  voyaging  allusion  is  made 
to  Seneca: 


"  So  Socrates,  so  Senyk,  and  Plato 
Suffred  great  wrong,  great  iniury  and  payne; 
And  of  your  faith  sayntis  right  many  mo 
For    Christ    our    mayster    did    great    turment 
sustayne!* 

And  throughout  are  to  be  found  such  philo- 
sophical commonplaces  as: 

"  The  wyse  man  to  utter  the  trouthe  is  not  aferde 
Though  he  shoulde  be  closyd  within  the  hull  of 

bras 
Of  Phalaris  the  tyrant" 

Cato  is  one  of  the  heroes  and  models;  the  work 
of  Seneca  is  as  clear  among  the  sources  as  is 
that  of  Plutarch  and  other  of  the  hero- 
biographers. 


[104] 


VI.   MONTAIGNE   AND   THE 
ELIZABETHANS 

WE  HAVE  seen  enough  to  draw  a 
conclusion  regarding  the  quaHties 
of  Seneca  which  appealed  to  pio- 
neers in  thought  and  in  religion.  The  Roman 
moralist  had  been  singled  out  by  the  early 
church  as  a  pagan  champion  of  Christianity; 
he  was  taken  over  by  them  as  a  kindred  spirit, 
as  one  whose  flexible  catholicity  pointed  for- 
ward to  ages  unborn  rather  than  backward  to 
classical  models.  We  note  his  appeal  to  Dante 
the  medieval  leader,  to  Chaucer  the  first 
modern  Englishman,  to  Petrarch  the  apostle  of 
humanism.  And  all  this,  much  as  it  is,  takes 
second  place  when  compared  with  the  way  in 
which  he  is  regarded  by  Montaigne,  "  the  first 
person,"  as  Hazlitt  remarked,  "  who  had  the 
courage  to  say  as  an  author  what  he  felt  as 
a  man." 

Michael  de  Montaigne  ^^  was  preceded  by 
a  host  of  translators  and  commentators  on  Sen- 
eca, who  left  much  material  and  much  interest 

[105] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

ready  to  his  hand.  Rabelais'  Gargantua  read 
"  Seneque  de  IV  Virtutibus  "  with  his  tutor, 
though  we  know  now  that  this  book  was  a 
collection  of  Senecan  ideas  by  Martinus 
Dumiensis,  of  the  sixth  century.  Charron, 
author  of  the  Sagesse,  declares:  "  I  have 
taken  the  greater  part  of  the  material  for  this 
work  from  the  best  authors  who  have  treated 
this  subject  of  morals  and  politics,  which  is  the 
true  science  of  man,  as  well  ancient,  espe- 
cially the  great  doctors  Seneca  and  Plutarch,  as 
modern."  Geoffrey  de  la  Chassaigne,  Mon- 
taigne's brother-in-law,  had  made  a  translation 
of  Seneca.  In  fact,  his  name  was  so  widely 
s/  known  that  when  Pasquier  desires  to  praise 
the  essays  of  Montaigne  he  does  it  in  this  wise: 
"  As  for  his  essays,  which  I  call  masterpieces, 
there  is  no  book  which  I  have  so  greatly  cher- 
ished. I  always  find  something  in  it  to  please 
me.  'Tis  a  French  Seneca."  And  finally,  we 
have  a  well-drawn  picture  of  the  tragedy- 
smitten  D'Aubigne  in  Les  Tragiques,  who  is 
represented  as  deeply  impressed  by  the  deaths 
of  Seneca  and  Thrasea.  The  days,  then,  of  the 
court  of  Henry  of  Navarre  lent  themselves 
to  this  cult. 
We  are  so  familiar  with  the  grand  Sieur 
[io6] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Eyquem  that  it  is  almost  superfluous  to  refer 
to  his  genial  declaration  of  theft:  "I  never 
seriously  settled  myself  to  the  reading  of  any 
book  of  solid  learning,  but  Plutarch  and  Sen- 
eca; and  then,  like  the  Danaides,  I  eternally 
fill,  and  it  constantly  runs  out."  Or,  "  la  sci- 
ence que  j'y  cherche  y  est  traictee  a  pieces 
discousues."  "  Such  are  the  minor  works  of 
the  first,  and  the  Epistles  of  the  latter,  which 
are  the  best  and  most  profitable  of  all  their 
writings."  "  Seneca  is  more  various  and  undu- 
lating, more  proper  for  private  sanction  and 
more  firm."  Montaigne's  titles  are  suggestive; 
the  Essay  of  Books  quotes  Ep.  90:  utrum  pec- 
care  aliquis  nolit;  Ep.  103:  licet  sapere  sine 
pompa;  Ep.  33:  non  sumus  sub  rege;  Ep.  88 
and  Ep.  106. 

All  these  Frenchmen,  and  especially  Mon- 
taigne, found  Seneca  congenial  because  he  was 
not  limited  to  philosophical  definitions  in  sup- 
port of  a  single  school  or  a  single  end,  because 
he  was  not  writing  a  text-book  of  Greek  phi- 
losophy for  Roman  readers,  because  he  was  not 
consciously  polishing  up  a  correspondence 
which  should  serve  later  as  a  mirror  for  a 
certain  epoch  of  Roman  history.  He  wrote  for 
the  world.     Montaigne's  world  had   become 

.     ■  [107] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

over-courtly;  the  era  of  jeweled  swords  was  to 
give  way  to  the  era  of  adventurous  exploration 
both  in  geography  and  in  thought.  And  this 
interesting  French  literary  Cervantes,  this 
upsetter  of  tradition,  sought  and  found  in  the 
moralist  of  the  early  Roman  Empire  a  kin- 
dred spirit.  These  men  served  no  masters. 
They  took  all  humanity  to  be  their  province. 

Plutarch  permeated  England  through  the 
translation  of  Sir  Thomas  North;  and  Seneca 
reached  the  British  vernacular  by  means  of 
Thomas  Lodge.  But  before  those  days,  and 
since  those  days  also,  many  men  had  him  at 
their  tongues^  and  pens^  end.  Elyot,  in  the 
Governour,  cites  him  often.  Ascham,  a 
Ciceronian,  debates  ''  whether  one  or  many 
are  to  be  followed;  and  if  one,  who  is  that  one 
—  Seneca  or  Cicero;  Sallust  or  Caesar."  Sir 
Thomas  Wyat's  Epigrams  are  full  of  Seneca. 
Henry  Parker,  Lord  Morley,  To  his  Posterity, 
sings: 

" The  mind  out  of  quiet"  so  sage  Seneca  saith, 
"  It  had  been  no  felicity,  but  a  painful  death" 

Turberville,  The  Lover  of  Cupid  for  Mercie, 
says  of  the  various  sages  who  uphold  reason 
and  decry  love: 

[io8] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

"  Next  Plutarch  Senec  came, 
Severe  in  all  his  sawes, 
Who  cleane  defide  your  wanton  tricks 
And  scornde  your  childish  lawes" 

Wyat's  Renouncing  of  Love  contains  the 
lines: 

"  Farewell  love,  and  all  thy  lawes  for  ever; 
Thy  bayted  hookes  shall  tangle  me  no  more; 
Senec  and  Plato  call  me  to  their  lore 
To  parfit  welth,  my  wit  for  to  endever" 

Thus  early  English  poetry, —  Renaissance  and 
Elizabethan.  We  might  multiply  instances. 
Here  Seneca  is  the  prop  for  serious  thinkers, 
the  defense  against  a  light-o'-love.  Bishop 
Hall,  who  knew  full  well  both  these  aspects  of 
his  fascinating  London,  was  called  the  "  Chris- 
tian Seneca  "  from  the  "  pith  and  clear  senten- 
tiousness  of  his  prose  style  "  as  well  as  from 
the  weight  of  his  serious  utterances.  We  shall 
see  later  how  this  is  borne  out  in  the  writings 
of  Jeremy  Taylor.  The  maintenance  of  this 
interest  at  a  slightly  earlier  period,  and  the 
proof  that  men  were  dwelling  on  these  prob- 
lems, appears,  for  example,  from  the  fact  that 
in  1648  Sir  Edward  Sherborne  translated  "  Sen- 
[109] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

eca's  answer  to  Lucilius'  question:  *  Why  good 
men  suffer  Misfortunes,  seeing  there  is  a  Divine 
Providence.' " 

Random  quotations,  mostly  unacknowledged, 
are  frequent.  Euphues  ascribes  to  Seneca 
Plutarch's  "Too  much  bending  breaketh  the 
bow."  The  Earl  of  Stirling  refers  to  the 
dictum  on  pain  (si  longus  levis,  si  gravis  brevis) 
in  his  63rd  Sonnet: 

"  Ojt  have  I  heard,  which  now  I  must  deny. 
That  nought  can  last  if  that  it  be  extreme" 

Donne,  as  usual,  loads  much  philosophy  into 
his  lyrics: 

"  Oood  we  must  love,  and  must  hate  ill, 
For  ill  is  ill,  and  good  good  still; 
But  there  are  things  indifferent, 
Which  we  may  neither  hate  nor  love, 
But  one,  and  then  another  prove, 
As  we  shall  find  our  fancy  bent" 

And  Daniel  quotes  Seneca,  in  his  Defence  of 
Rhym>e. 

Ben  Jonson,"  a  regular  Senecan,  had  evi- 
dently been  exploring  in  the  Naturales  Quaes- 
tiones: 

[no] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

"  Was  she  gracious  a-farre  off?    But  neere 
A  terrour?    Or  is  all  this  but  my  jeare? 
That  a^  the  water  makes  things^  put  in't  streight, 
Crooked  appeare;  so  that  doth  my  conceipt.'* 

In  the  Underwoods  Jonson  versifies  much  of 
the  De  Beneficiis.  He  cannot  write  a  lyric 
without  using  some  Latin  passage: 

**  And  as  a  cunning  painter  takes 
In  any  curious  peece  you  see, 
More  pleasure  while  the  thing  he  makes 
Then  when  'tis  made,  why,  so  will  we." 

And  Jonson's  critical  comment  {On  Abrupt- 
ness of  Style) J  similarly,  runs  back  to  Seneca: 
"  This  is  the  fault  of  some  Latin  writers,  within 
these  last  hundred  years,  of  my  reading,  and 
perhaps  Seneca  may  be  appeacht  of  it;  I  ac- 
cuse him  not/' 

"To  descend  to  those  extreme  anxieties  and 
foolish  cavils  of  grammarians  is  able  to  break 
a  wit  in  pieces;  being  a  work  of  manifold 
misery  and  vainenesse  to  be  elementarii  senes/^ 

Shakespeare,    who   blends   everything   into 

himself,  ill  rewards  any  search  for  quotations. 

His  chief  classical  model  was  North's  Plutarch; 

and  yet  it  is  as  futile  to  dissect  him  as  it  would 

[III] 


V 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

be  to  take  to  pieces  a  statue  of  Michelangelo. 
All  that  we  can  do  is  wonder  whether  his  omniv- 
orous mind  had  hovered  for  a  moment  on  a 
passage  of  Stoic  commonplace  when  he  elevated 
a  simple  thought  (the  saying:  patria  est  ubi- 
cumque  vales)  into  language  like  this: 

"  Ml  places  that  the  eye  of  heaven  visits 
Are  to  a  wise  man  ports  and  happy  havens"  — 

and  then  veto  any  idea  of  borrowing  on  the 
part  of  Shakespeare! 

There  are  but  two  places  which  seem  to 
show  obligation.  The  disguised  Duke,  moral- 
izing to  Claudio  in  Measure  for  Measure, 
undoubtedly  harks  back  to  Seneca,  as  well  as 
Claudio  himself,  who  invokes  death  in  Stoic 
terms: 

"  To  lie  in  cold  obstruction  and  to  rot; 
This  sensible  warm  motion  to  become 
A  kneaded  clod;  and  the  delighted  sptrit 
To  bathe  in  fiery  floods,  or  to  reside 
In  thrilling  region  of  thick-ribbSd  ice; 
To  be  imprisoned  in  the  viewless  winds, 
And  blown  in  restless  violence  round  about 
The  pendent  world;"  .  .  . 

[112] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

For  the  second  passage,  an  extended  study  has 
been  made  by  Sonnenschein  of  the  ''  Quality  of 
Mercy "  speech  in  the  Merchant  of  Venice, 
The  writer  compares  in  detail  certain  pas- 
sages of  Seneca's  De  Clementia,  stating  that 
"  Shakespeare  brings  at  the  outset  into  clearer 
relief  than  professed  political  philosophers  the 
saving  quality  of  mercy  in  the  rulers  of  men." 
Compare  Portia's 

"  It  becomes 
The  throned  monarch  better  than  his  crown" 

with  the  "  nullum  tamen  clementia  ex  omnibus 
magis  quam  regem  aut  principem  decet  "  of  De 
Clementia  I,  3.3. 


tii3] 


VII.    THE    MODERN   VIEW: 
FROM    BACON    TO    THE 
TWENTIETH   CENTURY 

FRANCIS  BACON ''  has  been  compared 
to  Seneca,  by  Canon  Farrar.  How  fair 
such  a  juxtaposition  may  be  admits  of 
considerable  doubt;  but  the  omniscient  quaH- 
ties  of  the  two  minds,  especially  with  regard  to 
science,  and  an  open-mindedness  toward  all 
philosophy  might  tempt  us  to  agree  partially 
with  this  statement.  Bacon  is  redolent  of  Sen- 
eca; but  he  is  so  redolent  of  almost  every 
classical  author  that  it  would  be  futile  to  single 
out  Seneca  for  quotation.  Suffice  it  to  say 
that  Seneca  occurs  equally  often  with  any  of 
the  ancients.  Bacon  was  the  first  critic  to 
understand  that  the  Epistles  of  Seneca  are 
really  essays.  In  the  dedication  of  his  own 
volume  to  Prince  Henry,  he  calls  them 
"  essaies,  dispersed  meditaciouns,  thoughe  con- 
veyed in  the  form  of  Epistles."  Just  as  he 
gave  Seneca  credit  for  the  creation  of  an  im- 
portant literary  type,  so  he  balances  the  ac- 

[114] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

count  by  criticizing  him,  along  with  Plato,  Plu- 
tarch and  Cicero,  for  having  "  spoiled  the 
stricter  investigation  of  truth."  Bacon's  very 
scientific  point  of  view  rebelled  against  mon- 
ism, and  dialectic,  and  any  philosophy  based 
upon  form,  in  the  same  manner  as  William 
James,  pluralistically  and  pragmatically  in- 
clined, rejects  the  absolutism,  the  "  idealistic 
pantheism  "  of  his  nineteenth  century  prede- 
cessors. Bacon's  was  the  laboratory  method. 
And  yet  he  concedes  the  inspiring  qualities  of 
these  men:  "  It  is  a  thing  not  hastily  to  be  con- 
demned: to  clothe  and  adorn  the  obscurity 
even  of  philosophy  itself  with  sensible  and 
plausible  elocution."  He  is  full  of  detailed 
references  to  Seneca,  understanding  his  acumen 
and  analyzing  his  conclusions.  "To  seek  to 
extinguish  anger  utterly  is  but  a  bravery  of  the 
Stoics.  We  have  better  oracles:  ^  Be  angry  but 
sin  not;  Let  not  the  sun  go  down  upon  your 
anger.' " 

There  is  almost  an  uncanny  sense  of  fitness 
in  the  justice  of  Bacon's  comments.  For  ex- 
ample, after  entirely  approving  Seneca's  polit- 
ical career,  "  to  the  eternal  glory  of  learned 
governors,"  we  note  these  words:  ''  Seneca,  who 
was   condemned    for   many   corruptions   and 

[115] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

crimes,  and  banished  into  a  solitary  island, 
kept  a  mean;  and  though  his  pen  did  not 
freeeze,  yet  he  abstained  from  intruding  into 
matters  of  business;  but  spent  his  time  in 
writing  books  of  excellent  argument  and  use 
for  all  ages;  though  he  might  have  made  better 
choice  (sometimes)  of  his  dedications  "  (as,  for 
example,  in  the  letter  to  Polybius  from  exile). 
He  sympathizes  with  the  Roman's  condem- 
nation of  sophisms  and  mental  juggling;  he  is 
at  one  with  him  in  the  desire  to  apply  scientific 
tests  to  knowledge;  and  he  cites  him  times 
without  number  to  add  weight  to  an  aphorism 
or  cap  a  climax. 

Very  significant  is  Bacon's  understanding  of 
the  passage  from  Seneca's  Medea,  wherein  the 
discovery  of  America  was  by  some  thought  to 
be  forecast: 

Venient  annis  saectda  seris, 
Quibus  Oceanus  vincula  rerum 
Laxet  et  ingens  pateat  tellus 
Tethysque  novos  detegat  orbes 
Nee  sit  terris  ultima  Thule. 

Columbus,  Roger  Bacon,  and  the  Cardinal 
d'Ailly  (whose  work  Columbus  studied)  knew 

[ii6] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

of  this  passage;  it  proves  that  some  semi-super- 
naturalism  became  associated  with  Seneca, 
assigning  to  him  prophetic  power,  as  was  the 
case  with  Virgil.  But  it  is  thought  that  the 
lines  refer  to  the  Spain-India  route  and  a  possi- 
biHty  of  developing  it;  the  Ultima  Thule  may 
have  turned  men's  minds  westward.  Bacon, 
in  his  Essay  of  Prophesies,  simply  remarks 
that  the  passage  "  ought  to  serve  but  for 
winter  talk  by  the  fireside." 

Burton's  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  with  its 
curious  "  parts,"  "  sections,"  "  members,"  and 
"  subsections,"  shows  the  great  prevalence  of 
the  Roman  moralist  in  seventeenth  century 
England:  even  the  ''  pretender  to  learning  must 
have  his  sentences  for  company,  some  scatter- 
ings of  Seneca  and  Tacitus."  The  references 
are  mostly  direct:  ''  it  was  a  chief  caveat  of 
Seneca,  '  a  wound  can  never  be  cured  that  hath 
several  plasters.'  "  "  Yet  hear  that  divine  Sen- 
eca: aliud  agere  quam  nihil, —  '  better  to  do  to 
no  end,  than  nothing.'  " 

Cowley's  essay  "  On  the  dangers  of  an  honest 
man  in  much  company "  reminds  us  of  the 
seventh  Epistle  On  Crowds;  and  in  the  essay 
"  Of  Myself,"  the  self-effacing  retirement  so 
often  advocated  by  the  Roman  is  praised  by  the 

[117] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

Englishman.  Cowley  also  (Essay  of  Solitude) 
quotes  the  eighty-sixth  Letter,  describing  the 
retreat  of  Scipio  at  Liternum,  as  a  sample  of 
greatness  avoiding  the  madding  crowd.  Her- 
rick,  curiously  enough,  weaves  into  his  verse 
much  of  this  philosophy,  strange  as  it  may 
seem  to  find  a  British  Catullus  moralizing. 
And  Prior  was  so  moved  by  the  contemplation 
of  Jordan's  painting  at  the  house  of  the  Earl  of 
Exeter  that  he  produced  a  poem  "  On  a  Picture 
of  Seneca  dying  in  a  Bath." 

Finally,  three  English  saints  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  discovered  in  Seneca  a  kindred 
spirit:  Jeremy  Taylor,  Thomas  Trahearne,  and 
Henry  Vaughan.  They  found  him  a  spiritual 
prop,  as  Montaigne  found  him  a  literary  prop. 
Taylor  interweaves  pagan  with  Christian  texts 
in  his  Holy  Living  and  Dying,  as  follows: 
"  Idleness  is  called  the  sin  of  Sodom  and  her 
daughters,  and  indeed  is  the  burial  of  a  living 
man,  an  idle  person  being  so  useless  to  any 
purposes  of  God  and  man,  that  he  is  like  one 
that  is  dead,  unconcerned  in  the  changes  and 
necessities  of  the  world;  and  he  only  lives  to 
spend  his  time,  and  eat  the  fruits  of  the  earth." 
Or,  "  The  Christian  religion  in  all  its  moral 
parts  is  nothing  else  but  the  law  of  nature  and 
[ii8] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

great  reason,  complying  with  the  great  necessi- 
ties of  all  the  world.'^  "  Neither  do  thou  get 
to  thyself  a  private  theatre  of  flatterers/'  quot- 
ing Ep.  7.9.  Taylor  is  full  of  this  non-Christian 
moralizing;  he  saw,  as  the  Church  Fathers 
saw  long  before  him,  that  one  can  have  no 
better  advocate  than  an  outsider  who  speaks 
the  same  language. 

Henry  Vaughan,  On  Sir  T.  Bodley's  Library, 
sings: 

"  Rare  Seneca!    How  lasting  is  thy  breath! 
Though  Nero  did,  thou  couldst  not  bleed  to  death. 
How;  dull  the  expert  Tyrant  was,  to  look 
For  that  in  thee,  which  lived  in  thy  Book!  " 

also,  "Patience:  that  which  being  made  evil 
by  abuse,  yet  in  that  state  hath  been  com- 
mended by  men  that  were  not  evil,  by  Seneca 
in  his  Cato.  .  .  ." 

And  the  curiously  mystical  Thomas  Tra- 
hearne,  who  relies  on  Scripture  and  little 
besides  for  his  Hterary  furniture,  remarks: 
"  So  that  Seneca  philosophized  rightly  when  he 
said:  ^  Deus  me  dedit  solum  toti  mundo,  et 
totum  mundum  mihi  soli.' "  (God  gave  me 
alone  to  all  the  world,  and  all  the  world  to  me 

[119] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

alone.)  An  example  of  the  pointed  style,  as 
well  as  the  thought,  of  Seneca  is  "  Wants  here 
may  be  seen  and  enjoyed;  enjoyments  there 
shall  be  seen,  but  wanted  "(o^  Heaven  and 
Hell). 

This  religious  strain  counted  also  upon  the 
Continent;  among  certain  sects,  such  as  the 
Labadists  of  the  seventeenth  century,  Seneca 
and  Thomas  a  Kempis  were  held  in  high  favor 
on  account  of  their  mystic  qualities.  We 
have  a  pretty  picture  of  a  young  Dutch  girl, 
Anna  van  Schurman,^*  whose  father  reads  the 
philosophy  of  Seneca  to  her  by  way  of  initi- 
ation into  Latin, —  an  interest  which  is  reflected 
in  many  a  "  Life  and  Letters  "  of  the  period. 
Rubens  and  Vondel  were  fond  of  Seneca;  and 
Grotius  quotes  from  the  117th  Epistle,  with 
reference  to  the  principle  that  consent  is  the 
basis  of  law. 

Dryden,  Langbaine,  and  Patrick  Hannay  in 
England  hold  Seneca  in  great  secular  respect. 
Dryden 's  maiden  verses,  on  Lord  Hastings, 
place  him  in  great  company: 

"  O  had  he  died  of  old,  how  great  a  strife 
Had  been  who  from  his  death  should  draw  their 
life/ 

[  120] 


AND    HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

y^ho  should,  by  one  rich  draught,  become  whatever 
Seneca,  Cato,  Numa,  Caesar  were, 
Learned,  virtuous,  pious,  great,  and  have  by  this 
A«  universal  metempsychosis!  " 

And  Langbaine,  in  the  essay  on  Dryden 
where  he  criticizes  the  drama  Indian  Emperor, 
remarks  on  plagiarisms  "  from  Plutarch,  Sen- 
eca, Montaigne,  Fletcher,"  etc. 

Hannay,  in  A  Happy  Husband: 

"  Seneca  saith,  the  gods  did  take  delight 
To  see  grave  Cato  with  his  fate  to  fight." 

Milton,  in  his  treatise  On  Education,  recom- 
mends the  reading  of  the  Naturales  Quaes- 
tiones,  although  he  seems  not  so  reverent  when 
he  speaks  of  ''  Seneca,  in  his  books  a  phi- 
losopher." 

Finally,  Fontenelle^s  Dialogues  des  Morts 
(1683)  represents  Scarron,  author  of  the  bur- 
lesque on  the  Aeneid,  holding  converse  with 
Seneca  on  the  proximity  of  the  sublime  to  the 
ridiculous. 

Up  to  this  point  Seneca  has  been  called  as  a 
witness  under  favorable  circumstances.  We 
must  now  note  a  change  in  the  spirit  of  the 
times.      The    eighteenth    century    paused    to 

[121] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

elaborate  and  take  stock,  after  an  adventurous 
sixteenth  and  a  speculative  seventeenth.  Now 
Seneca  is  not  an  author  whom  anyone  would 
regard  as  finished.  The  general  reading 
public  ran  more  towards  vignettes  of  the  past, 
or  long  treatises  on  small  topics,  or  burlesque 
studies  of  serious  themes.  There  was  a  nar- 
rower margin  between  the  dignified  and  the 
absurd.  People  were  not  looking  forward  in 
the  age  of  Queen  Anne,  nor  was  freshness  or 
originality  the  watchword.  The  best  spirits 
made  fun  of  the  world,  and  its  pioneer  news- 
papers waxed  sarcastic.  Rousseau  was  almost 
as  unhappy  in  England  as  he  was  in  France. 
Emotion  and  decorum  had  lost  connection  with 
one  another.  The  critics  became  skeptical 
over  the  old  masters.  "  I  assure  you,  sir,"  says 
one,^^  "  I  shall,  in  the  enjoyment  of  your 
letters,  think  myself  little  less  honoured  than 
I  do  Lucillius  by  Seneca's."  Lord  Shaftesbury 
had  doubted  Seneca's  right  to  stand  among  the 
moral  leaders  of  the  world:  "  Few  indeed  (as 
the  satirist  says)  are  so  detestable  as  to  prefer 
Nero  to  Seneca;  but  how  many  would  prefer 
Seneca  to  Rufus?  For  see  how  even  Tacitus 
himself  treats  this  latter."  William  Wotton 
(1666-1726),  in  his  Essay  on  Ancient  and 
[  122  ] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

Modern  Learnings  declares:  "  That  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  a  decay  of  eloquence  in  after 
ages,  which  have  the  performances  of  those 
that  went  before  constantly  to  recur  to,  and 
which  may  be  supposed  to  pretend  to  skill  and 
fineness,  is  evident  from  the  writings  of  Sen- 
eca and  the  younger  Pliny,  compared  with 
Tully's." 

France  at  this  time  began  a  systematic 
deprecation  of  Stoicism.  Bossuet,^^  Fenelon 
and  Pascal  (who  had  received  much  benefit 
from  it  during  their  early  training)  compared 
Stoicism,  to  its  own  disadvantage,  with  the 
best  type  of  Christianity,  thereby  undermining 
its  ancillary  value  as  an  adjunct  and  an  aid 
to  Christian  faith  in  the  minds  of  intelligent 
contemporaries,  both  scholars  and  churchmen. 
La  Bruyere  and  Malebranche  laughed  Stoicism 
away.  The  latter  declared  that  Seneca  re- 
sembled "  ceux  qui  dansent,  qui  finissent  tou- 
jours  ou  ils  ont  commences";  and  he  main- 
tained that  the  idea  of  putting  the  sage  on  a 
parity  with  the  gods  was  futile:  that  Seneca's 
conception  of  the  wise  man  was  pompous, 
that  the  imagination  of  the  Roman  slipped 
its  leash,  and  that  continual  droning  about 
Cato  was  a  bore.  Malebranche  did  not  under- 
[123] 


SENECA    THE    PHILOSOPHER 

Stand,  as  Jeremy  Taylor  and  Vaughan  —  saints 
both  —  had  understood,  that  many  a  wondrous 
paradox  would  be  weakened,  including  parts 
of  the  New  Testament,  if  such  a  policy  of  fil- 
ing and  repression  were  continually  employed. 
And  we  must  remember  that  to  Pascal  the 
especial  "  pagans  "  were  Epictetus  and  Mon- 
taigne. Elizabeth  of  Bohemia  "  had  written 
to  Descartes  that  she  preferred  his  morality 
and  his  reasoning  powers  to  Seneca's.  After 
receiving  from  Descartes  an  account  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  Seneca,  Epicurus,  Zeno,  and  Aris- 
totle, she  replies :  "  I  attribute  the  obscurity 
to  be  found  in  his  book,  as  well  as  in  most  of 
the  ancient  writers,  to  a  manner  of  explaining 
quite  unlike  ours,  so  that  the  same  things 
which  are  problematical  amongst  us  may  pass 
for  hypotheses  with  them,  and  the  want  of  con- 
nection and  order  which  he  observes  to  the 
design  of  gaining  admirers  by  astonishing  the 
admiration,  rather  than  disciples  by  informing 
the  judgment;  that  Seneca  uses  fine  phrases 
as  others  poetry  or  fable,  to  attract  youth  to 
follow  his  opinion."  But  none  of  these  critics 
went  so  far  as  La  Rochefoucauld,  who  makes 
Seneca  the  frontispiece  to  his  Maximes,  por- 
trayed as  a  rascal  with  a  mask  of  virtue. 

[124] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

On  both  sides  of  the  English  channel  the 
Age  of  Reason  was  tending  to  empiricism  and 
pragmatism.  A  French  thinker  could  condemn 
Stoicism  as  a  ";eM  d'esprit  like  Plato's  Re- 
public," and  the  so-called  sage  as  a  "  fantome 
de  vertu  et  de  Constance!  "  It  is  natural,  and 
we  can  understand  even  Bossuet  —  the  Dau- 
phin-guide, the  writer  of  the  Letter  to  Pope 
Innocent,  the  ecclesiastical  scholar,  like  Seneca 
in  so  many  ways  —  when  he  cries :  "  Laissez 
votre  Seneque  avec  ses  superbes  opinions.  Ce 
philosophe  insultait  aux  miseres  du  genre  hu- 
main  par  une  raillerie  arrogante."  Montes- 
quieu revolts  also:  picturing  a  Persian  travel- 
ling in  Europe  and  writing  home  from  France 
(as  Goldsmith's  Citizen  of  the  World  writes 
home  to  China),  Usbek  says:  "When  a 
European  meets  with  misfortune,  his  only 
resource  is  to  read  a  philosopher  called  Seneca; 
when  an  Asiatic  falls  into  sorrow,  he  at  least 
has  recourse  to  a  stimulating  beverage."  The 
eighteenth  century,  weary  of  enthusiasms,  was 
weary  of  Seneca  also. 

The  course  in  England  runs  rather  similarly 
to  that  in  France.  Addison  quotes  the  sacer 
intra  nos  spiritus,  which  we  have  noted  in 
considering  the  congeniality  between  Seneca 

[125] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

and  the  early  church.  Bolingbroke's  Reflex- 
ions in  Exile  are  like  Seneca's  own  essay  from 
Corsica;  but  enthusiasm  seems  lacking.  Gold- 
smith compares  unfavorably  the  style  of  the 
Italian  composers  with  that  of  Seneca  (in  his 
Schools  of  Music);  Sir  William  Temple  com- 
ments on  the  decline  of  the  Latin  tongue  after 
the  time  of  Cicero;  Watts  (Hero's  School  of 
Morality)  sings  a  similar  lullaby: 

"  Lie  still,  my  Plutarch,  then,  and  sleep, 
And  you,  good  Seneca,  may  keep 
Your  volumes  closed  forever,  too; 
I  have  no  further  use  for  you;  " 

and  the  Parson  in  Tom  Jones  bolsters  two 
harangues  by  burlesquing  Seneca.  There  are, 
however,  two  stout  worthies  who  remain  loyal. 
Diderot,^^  who  had  disparaged  Seneca  in  his 
own  essay  On  Merit  and  Virtue,  took  up  the 
cudgels  later  in  life,  became  interested  in  La 
Grange,  the  translator  of  Seneca,  and  fought 
La  Harpe  on  the  question  of  the  Roman  phi- 
losopher's place  in  the  history  of  morals.  And 
the  last  voice  of  the  old  school  is  raised  in  his 
favor.  Boswell  declared :  "  For  Seneca  I  have 
a  double  reverence,  both  for  his  own  worth, 
[126] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

and  he  was  the  heathen  sage  whom  my  grand- 
father constantly  studied/' 

Thus  rationalizing  France,  and  England, 
which  was  preparing  for  Adam  Smith  and  in- 
dustrial invention,  were  not  favorable  ground 
for  a  philosophy  that  depended  for  its  head- 
way upon  a  purely  intellectual  type  of  ideal- 
ism. New  things  were  coming;  but  only 
two  great  masters  of  those  days  maintained 
the  view  which  put  Seneca  among  the  leaders 
of  thought:  these  were  Rousseau  and  Voltaire. 

Rousseau,  who,  says  Diderot,  "  reminds  us 
of  Seneca  in  a  hundred  ways,"  wrecked  a 
France  still  medieval.  Essentially  flexible  in 
his  style  and  manner,  Rousseau  broke  new 
ground  in  his  Discourse  on  the  Arts  and  Sci- 
ences, an  essay  which  was  published  in  1750 
and  which  embodies  the  fundamental  prin- 
ciples of  his  creed.  The  glory  of  the  country, 
the  grandeur  of  simplicity,  the  aspect  of 
virtue  in  its  essentials:  all  these  ideas  fore- 
stall the  Rousseauism  with  which  we  are 
familiar,  and  despite  debate  on  the  subject 
of  what  is  Classicism  and  what  is  Romanti- 
cism, are  the  keynote  to  our  ideas  of  the  French 
innovator.  The  "  follow  Nature  "  motto  is 
hard  to  define;  but  it  certainly  was  not  the 
[127] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

old  order.  Rousseau  is  also  frank  enough  to 
criticize  Seneca,  and  does  not  follow  him 
slavishly. 

Voltaire  is  always  discriminating;  he  says  in 
Candide:  "  There  are  bundles  of  sermons 
which  all  put  together  are  not  worth  a  single 
page  of  Seneca."  How  far  Voltaire  is  in 
earnest  here  we  cannot  tell ;  for  he  also  speaks 
of  Calvin  with  tongue  in  cheek:  "  He  knew 
some  Latin,  some  Greek,  and  some  of  the  bad 
philosophy  current  in  his  day."  And  Madame 
de  Stael  thought  that  Seneca's  philosophy 
"  penetrated  farther  into  the  heart  of  man  " 
than  Cicero's. 

Macaulay  and  Niebuhr  disagree  with,  and 
disapprove  of,  Seneca.  Macaulay  takes  the  side 
of  Posidonius  in  regard  to  the  topic  discussed 
in  the  90th  Epistle,  maintaining  that  the  ear- 
lier inventors  had  a  right  to  be  called  philoso- 
phers. Landor  handles  him  roughly  in  the 
Imaginary  Conversations ,  preferring  Epictetus 
and  a  simple  life  lived  without  any  advertise- 
ment of  "honest  poverty."  He  also  hits  at 
him  in  a  portrait-skit: 

"  I  voted  we  should  have  but  two 
At  dinner;  these  are  quite  enow; 

[128] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

One  of  them,  worth  half  Rome,  will  meet  us, 

'Low-stationed,  high-souled  Epictetus. 

He  told  his  mind  the  other  day 

To  ruby-fingered  Seneca, 

Who,  rich  and  proud  as  Nero,  teaches 

The  vanity  of  pomp  or  riches." 

One  doubts  whether  Epictetus  would  have 
sat  down  to  dinner  with  Landor;  Seneca  could 
have  handled  him  better  in  conversation.  And 
when  Landor  accuses  Seneca,  in  the  mouth  of 
Epictetus,  of  diverging  "  from  the  plain  homely 
truths  of  Zeno  and  Cleanthes,''  it  is  hardly 
fair  to  hold  Epictetus  as  the  authority.  Stoi- 
cism would  never  have  grown  into  the  great 
bulwark  of  practical  Rome,  if  its  votaries  had 
not  left  Zeno  and  Clean thes  far  behind. 

Sydney  Smith,  an  empiricist  like  most  of 
his  contemporaries,  is  a  bit  nettled  also.  On 
being  left  one-third  of  a  fortune  by  his  brother 
Courtenay,  he  writes:  "  After  buying  into  the 
Consols  and  the  Reduced,  I  read  Seneca  on 
The  Contempt  of  Wealth.  What  intolerable 
nonsense!  I  have  been  happier  every  guinea 
I  have  gained."  And,  "  The  longer  I  live  the 
more  convinced  I  am  that  the  apothecary  is  of 
more  importance  than  Seneca." 

[129] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

Before  the  nineteenth  century  is  well  under 
way  and  before  Seneca  comes  into  his  own 
again,  there  is  some  mixed  evidence.  Goethe 
recommends  the  Naturales  Quaestiones  as 
"  charming  "  reading.  Leigh  Hunt  refers  to 
him.  Charles  Lamb  proves  the  enduring  name 
of  the  Roman  by  a  remark  on  his  use  as  a  peda- 
gogical medium:  "Though  they  (mercenary 
schoolmasters)  put  into  his  (the  scholar's) 
hands  the  fine  sayings  of  Seneca  and  Epic- 
tetus,  yet  they  themselves  are  none  of  those 
disinterested  pedagogues  to  teach  philosophy 
gratis/'  Coleridge  is  interesting  in  the  variety 
of  his  criticism.  He  says  in  one  place:  "  There 
is  in  some  men  an  affected  pride  of  spirit 
suitable  only  to  the  doctrine  of  the  Stoics  as 
it  is  usually  taken."  He  mentions  also  "  cer- 
tain brilliant  inconsistencies  of  Seneca";  but 
he  quotes  him  on  many  occasions  with  ap- 
proval, especially  in  one  of  his  Aphorisms: 
"  To  those  who  decry  the  doctrine  of  the  Spirit 
in  man  and  its  possible  communion  with  the 
Holy  Spirit  as  vulgar  enthusiasm,  I  submit  the 
following  sentence  from  a  pagan  philosopher, 
a  nobleman,  and  a  minister  of  state;  ^  Ita  dico, 
Lucili,  sacer  intra  nos  spiritus  sedet.'  " 

The  text  to  Wordsworth's  Ode  to  Duty  is 

[130] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

from  Seneca.  So  is  the  patched-up  motto  "  nil 
sapientiae  odiosius  acumine  nimio,"  prefixed 
by  Poe  to  his  Purloined  Letter,  De  Quincey 
quotes  him  and  couples  him  with  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  as  a  master  of  rhetor  tea  utens.  And 
Thomas  Jefferson,  writing  to  a  favorite 
nephew,  urges  him  to  become  familiar  with 
Seneca,  as  well  as  with  Epictetus,  Plato,  Xeno- 
phon,  and  Cicero. 

But  there  are  three  literary  critics  of  un- 
doubted taste  and  authority  who  restore  Sen- 
eca to  his  proper  standing.  These  men  under- 
stand that  the  question  is  not  one  of  attempt- 
ing to  square  statesmanship  with  philosophy, 
but  how  much  of  value  Seneca  contributes  to 
the  spirit  and  the  intellect.  Matthew  Arnold 
calls  him  a  stimulating  writer;  Sainte-Beuve 
declares,  "  La  vraie  baguette  d'enchantment  de 
Seneque,  c'est  d'abord  son  style  .  .  .  le  style, 
un  sceptre  d'or  a  qui  reste,  en  definitive,  I'em- 
pire  de  ce  monde."  Emerson,^^  especially  in 
the  recently  published  Journals,  records  of  his 
workshop,  shows  again  and  again  that  he  has 
read  and  pondered  the  ancient  master  with 
care.  He  records  reading  Montaigne  to  see 
how  he  approaches  Seneca;  he  comes  back 
often  to  the  Stoic:  "putting  oneself  into  har- 

[131] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

mony  with  the  constitution  of  things."  Speak- 
ing of  Burton  and  the  "  vocabulary  class  "  of 
writers,  he  says:  "  Now  and  then  out  of  that 
affluence  of  their  learning  comes  a  fine  sen- 
tence from  Theophrastus,  Seneca,  or  Boethius, 
but  no  high  method,  no  inspiring  efflux."  "  Let 
us  learn  to  live  coarsely,  dress  plainly,  and  lie 
hard."  "  Sad  is  this  continual  postponement 
of  life."  Finally,  the  Journal  of  1820-4 
records  Seneca  as  a  regular  part  of  the  reading- 
course  in  ancient  authors.  There  is  much  in 
common  between  the  two, —  their  scorn  of 
commitment  to  any  one  system,  their  open- 
mindedness,  and  their  self-sufficiency  and  inde- 
pendence of  doctrine.  He  cries  out  for  calm, 
like  Seneca  and  like  the  French  quietist  Jou- 
bert,  who  said:  "aimer  le  repos,  le  repos," 
reminding  us  of  the  "  retreat "  of  Seneca,  the 
living  within  oneself.  This,  after  all,  is  Sen- 
eca's greatest  contribution  to  the  thought  of 
the  world. 

Nietzsche    perhaps    condemns    himself    by 
writing  of  him: 

"  Seneca  et  hoc  genus  omne 
T>as    schreibt    und   schreibt    sein   unausstehlich 

weises  harifari, 
Als  gaelt  es  primum  scribere,  deinde  philosophari." 

[132  ] 


AND    HIS     MODERN     MESSAGE 

And  Victor  Hugo,  in  his  loud  impressiveness, 
cries: 

"  Uamtere  Sen^que,  en  louant  Diogenes 
Buvait  le  Falerne  dans  Vor"   r  j^.,  p , 

Herman  Melville,  writer  of  sea-tales,  describ- 
ing the  costume  of  a  frigate  officer  going  into 
battle,  thinks  of  the  last  days  of  the  Roman: 
"  No  ill-will  concerning  his  tailor  should  in- 
trude upon  his  thoughts  of  eternity.  Seneca 
understood  this  when  he  chose  to  die  naked  in 
a  bath."  Lord  Coleridge  takes  Seneca  away 
with  him  for  vacation  reading,  along  with 
Cowper,  Cicero,  Wordsworth,  and  Livingston. 
Poets  of  recent  date  have  turned  to  his  pro- 
verbial sayings,  as  did  Chaucer  five  hundred 
years  before  them.  John  Godfrey  Saxe  (Com- 
pensation) sings: 

"  When  once,  in  Merrie  England, 
A  prisoner  of  state 
Stood  waiting  death  or  exile, 
Submissive  to  his  fate. 
He  made  this  famous  answer, — 
*  Si  longa  levis, 
Dura,  brevis, 
Go  and  tell  your  tyrant  chief! ' " 

[  133] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

And  Richard  Watson  Dixon,  in  his  poem  on 
St.  Paul,  pictures  Gallio  as  describing  to  his 
brother  Seneca  the  famous  meeting  with  the 
apostle.  And  who  that  was  present,  or  heard 
the  account  from  one  who  was  present,  could 
ever  forget  the  tribute  to  Grover  Cleveland, 
from  the  lips  of  James  Russell  Lowell  at  the 
Harvard  Anniversary  celebration  of  1886? 
"  He  has  left  the  helm  of  state,  to  be  with  us 
here,  and  so  long  as  it  is  intrusted  to  his  hands 
we  are  sure  that,  should  the  storm  come,  he 
will  say  with  Seneca's  Pilot:  ^  O  Neptune,  you 
may  save  me  if  you  will;  you  may  sink  me  if 
you  will;  but  whatever  happen,  I  shall  keep 
my  rudder  true.'  " 


[134] 


VIII.   CONCLUSIONS 

THE  SCHOLARLY  vote  now  puts  Sen- 
eca where  he  belongs.  Mr.  Living- 
stone declares:  "  It  is  almost  impossi- 
ble to  persuade  those  who  do  not  know  it,  that 
classical  literature  is  in  any  sense  modern;  they 
think  of  it  as  something  primitive  and  barba- 
rous, and  they  will  not  believe  that  Euripides 
or  Seneca  have  as  much  in  common  with  the 
twentieth  century  as  Scott  or  Thackeray."  And 
another  modern  educator,  stressing  the  theory 
of  imitation  which  underlies  all  the  training  of 
youth,  turns  to  Seneca  again  for  backing: 
^^  Long  is  the  road  through  precepts,  short  and 
effective  through  examples."  Dr.  Osier,  also, 
joins  the  throng  of  Senecans  by  echoing  the 
famous  passage,  already  quoted,  on  the  joys  of 
reading:  "  If  you  are  fond  of  books,  you  will 
escape  the  ennui  of  life;  you  will  neither  sigh 
for  evening,  disgusted  with  the  occupations  of 
the  day,  nor  will  you  live  dissatisfied  with 
yourself  or  unprofitable  to  others." 

Maeterlinck  rates  Seneca  high.     He  is  re- 

[135] 


SENECA     THE     PHILOSOPHER 

ported  to  have  said,  when  asked  what  books  he 
should  choose  if  he  were  Hmited  to  three  only, 
that  one  of  these  would  be  Pin tr el's  transla- 
tion of  the  Letters,  And  it  is  interesting  to 
note  that  this  book  is  to  be  reprinted  in  France 
as  a  memorial  on  the  tercentenary  of  the  birth 
of  LaFontaine,  to  whom  Pintrel  had  be- 
queathed the  manuscript  and  under  whose  aus- 
pices it  was  published  in  1684.  In  his  Essay  on 
Death,  Maeterlinck  says:  "If  physicians  thus 
delay  the  end  of  a  torture  which,  as  good  Sen- 
eca says,  is  the  best  part  of  that  torture,  they 
are  only  yielding  to  the  unanimous  error  which 
daily  strengthens  the  circle  wherein  it  is  con- 
fined." 

Seneca  will  soon  come  into  his  own.  There 
is  now  a  period  of  freer  thought  and  of  deeper 
religion  on  the  way.  The  elasticity  in  litera- 
ture which,  though  crude,  betokens  an  era  of 
progress;  the  possibility  of  raising  the  con- 
science of  a  nation  to  the  standards  of  an 
individual;  and  the  philosophy  of  freedom 
from  fettered  prejudices, —  all  these  phenom- 
ena are  of  a  sort  with  which  the  subject  of  this 
sketch  would  have  readily  sympathized. 
Eucken  was  right  when  he  penned  these  words: 
"  In  the  period  of  the  Enlightenment  the  writ- 

[136] 


AND     HIS     MODERN     MESS 


Xge 


ings  of  a  Lucretius  and  a  Seneca,  a  Plutarch 
and  a  Marcus  Aurelius,  were  in  the  piands  of 
all  cultivated  persons.  Since  the  rise  of  modern 
Humanism,  however,  this  is  no  longer  the  case. 
But  do  not  the  more  vigorous  development  of 
the  individual  and  the  intensifying  of  life  which 
we  are  experiencing  to-day  bring  us  nearer 
again  to  later  antiquity?  " 

We  have  seen  that  in  periods  when  new  ideas 
are  in  the  air,  Seneca  furnishes  material  for 
the  promoter  and  for  the  interpreter  of  prog- 
ress. We  noted  his  influence  as  a  forerunner 
or  an  ex  post  facto  advocate  of  the  Christian 
religion.  Montaigne,  in  breaking  up  the  arti- 
ficialities of  a  worn-out  chivalry  in  France, 
draws  from  the  Corduban  as  from  a  never-fail- 
ing spring.  Petrarch's  return  to  the  classics 
signalized  itself  by  close  adaptation  to  the  style 
of  Seneca.  Chaucer's  English  leadership,  Eliza- 
bethan pioneering,  the  experiments  of  Rous- 
seau, and  the  various  attempts  to  explain  phi- 
losopher-kingship during  the  last  eight  centu- 
ries —  all  these  are  indicative  of  a  latent  power 
which  has  never  been  sufficiently  acknowl- 
edged. 

One  is  led  to  speculate  whether,  as  the 
modern   materialistic   tendency   declines   and 

[137] 


SENECA     THE    PHILOSOPHER 

the  power  of  mind  and  spirit  increases,  the 
originality  of  Seneca's  message  may  not  again 
be  an  auxiliary  force  in  the  world's  progress 
toward  a  deeper  Christianity. 


[138] 


NOTES  AND  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


NOTES 

Limitation  of  space  imposed  by  the  plan  of  this 
series  forbids  the  inclusion  of  complete  references 
which  would  be  expected  in  a  longer  work.  There- 
fore only  the  most  essential  notes  of  a  general 
nature  are  given,  but  the  author  will  gladly  furnish 
further  references  to  interested  scholars. 

1.  Horace,  Odes,  III.  6.  31  f. 

navis  Hispanae  magistefy 
dedecorum  preiiosus  emptor. 

2.  Martial,  IV.  40.  2,  i.e.,  the  Elder  Seneca,  Seneca 
the  Younger  (our  philosopher),  and  Lucan,  the  former's 
grandson.  Cf.  also  VII.  45.  i.  (facundus  Seneca),  I.  61.  7  fiE., 
and  XII.  36.  8  ff. 

3.  Cf.  Epigram  8  (of  doubtful  authenticity).  Ad  Helv. 
(ed.  Duff)  2.  5;    18.  4-6,  etc. 

4.  James  Boswell,  An  Account  of  Corsica,  London,  1768. 

5.  Tacitus,  Ann.  15.  61  ff.,  trans.  Ramsay. 

6.  A  summary  of  the  most  important  testimony  regarding 
Seneca  maybe  found  as  follows:  Pliny,  N.H.,  14.  4;  14.  51. 
Columella,  R.  R.,  3.  3.  Juvenal,  5.  109,  etc.  Ausonius,  p.  361 
(ed.  Peiper).  Fronto  (ed.  Naber)  pp.  123,  155-8,  224.  Quin- 
tilian,  10.  i.  125.  Gellius,  Noct.  Att.,  12.  2.  2  ff.  Plutarch, 
Moral.,  3.  201  and  Galba,  20.  Boethius,  Cons.  Phil.,  1  Pref.  3. 
Macrobius,  Sat.,  i.  11.  7ff.  A  complete  story  is  found  in 
Tacitus,  Ann.  12.  8;  13.  2,  5  ff.,  25,  28  ff.,  42;  14.  52  ff.; 
15. 45, 60  ff.  Cf.  also  Dio,  59. 19;  61.  3-4,  etc.;  and  Suetonius, 
Calig.,  Claud.,  and  Nero.  Suetonius  is  now  accessible  in 
the  Loeh  Library,  translated  by  J.  C.  Rolfe;  Dio,  in  the  same 
series,  by  E.  Cary,  is  forthcoming. 

7.  Pliny,  Nat.  Hist.,  9.  53;  6  and  36. 

[  141  ] 


NOTES 

8.  Cf.  A.  S.  Pease,  "The  Attitude  of  Jerome  towards 
Pagan  Literature,"  in  Transactions  oj  the  American  Philo- 
logical Association,  L.   150-167   (1919). 

9.  Trans.  W.  H.  Porter,  in  E.  Vernon  Arnold's  Roman 
Stoicism,  Cambridge,  191 1,  pp.  86  ff. 

10.  Sen.,  Brev.  Vit.,  14.  2.  V.  B.,  13.  i.  Ep.,  2.  5;  85.  i; 
88.  44;  108.  22.  For  the  whole  subject  of  soul  and  body  in 
Seneca,  cf.  Ep.  24.  18;  65.  24;  Ad  Polyb.,  5.  i  and  9.  2, 
(statement  of  the  problem).  Ep.  54.  4,  71.  15,  82.  15  ff.,  and 
Frag.  28,  (negation).  Ep.  36.  9  ff.,  75.  17  ff.,  63.  16,  92. 
30  ff.,  102.  I  and  22  ff.,  and  Helv.  11.  6  ff.,  (approval  of 
immortaUty). 

II.  Quid  de  Deo  Seneca  Senserit,  Paris,  1884;  E.  Wester- 
burg,  Der  Ursprimg  der  Sage  dass  Seneca  Christ  gewesen  sei, 
Berlin,  1881.  Min.  Fel.,  Octav.,  3$.  i;  Tertul.,  De  Anima, 
20;  Lact.,  Inst.,  i.  5;   Sen.,  Ep.  8.  7,  41.  2,  92.  30. 

12.  For  the  modem  tendencies  discussed  in  the  pre- 
ceding pages,  the  author  has  made  frequent  use  of  his  "  Modem 
Note  in  Seneca's  Letters,"  in  Classical  Philology,  X.  139-150 
(1915).  For  a  beginning  of  the  studies  to  which  the  rest  of 
this  book  is  devoted,  see  Proceedings  of  the  American  Philo- 
logical Association,  XLII.  38-40  (191 1),  and  XLIII.  26-29 
(191 2).  W.  C.  Summers,  Selected  Letters  of  Seneca,  London, 
1910;  Introduction,  Section  C,  contains  much  valuable 
material. 

13.  Ad  Paid,  de  Brev.  Vit.,  14  f. 

14.  Cf.  J.  E.  B.  Mayor,  "Seneca  in  Alain  of  Lille,"  in 
Journal  of  Philology,  XX.  1-6  (1892).;  A.  de  I.,  trans,  by 
D.  M.  Moffat,  New  York,  1908  (Holt),  esp.  pp.  34,  58,  67, 

73,  91- 

15.  V.  of  B.,  Bk.  4,  ch.  70;  Bk.  6.,  ch.  38.  Girald.,  Every- 
man edn.,  p.  151,  etc.  J.  S.  Brewer,  Life  of  Bacon,  p.  73,  in 
Works  of  Roger  Bacon,  London,  1859.  J.  E.  Sandys,  A  History 
of  Classical  Scholarship,  Cambridge,  1908;    I.  569,  574. 

16.  Metalogicus,  i.  22.  Policraticus,  5.  10  and  8.  13. 
Contra  Jov.  ch.  48. 

17.  F.  S.  Stevenson,  Life  of  G.,  London,  1899,  pp.  34  ff., 
91  ff.;   H.  R.  Luard's  edn.  of  G.'s  Letters,  London,  1861. 

18.  Cf.  E.  Moore,  Studies  in  Dante,  Oxford,   1896 — , 

[142] 


NOTES 

ist  Ser.,  pp.  14,  16,  198,  288  ff.  P.  Toynbee,  Danle  Stud, 
and  Res.,  New  York,  1902,  pp.  40  and  150  ff.  Inferno,  4. 
141;  Convito,  I.  8,  2.  14,  4.  12,  14.  12,  and  Ep.  4.  5.  These 
may  be  compared  with  Sen.  Ep.,  95.  3,  76;  109.  17  ff.;  N.  Q., 

I.  I,  7.  17,  etc. 

19.  Cf.  an  excellent  monograph  by  Harry  M.  Ayres, 
"Chaucer  and  Seneca,"  in  Romanic  Review,  X.  1-15  (1919). 
See  also  T.  R.  Lounsbury ,  Chaucer  Studies,  New  York,  1902; 

II.  249  ff. 

20.  Cf.  De  Nolhac,  Petrarch  et  rHumanisme,  Paris, 
1907;  Petrarch,  Letters  to  Classical  Authors,  trans.  M.  E. 
Cosenza,  New  York,  1898,  esp.  pp.  88  ff.;  J.  H.  Robinson 
and  H.  W.  Rolfe,  Petrarch,  Chicago,  1910;  Int.,  p.  50,  pp. 
141,  151  ff.,  230  ff.,  281. 

21.  Cf.  P.  Villey,  Les  Sources  et  V Evolution  des  Essais  de 
Montaigne,  Paris,  1908;  esp.  I.  15  ff.,  99,  and  279.  Also, 
A.  A.  Tilley,  Lit.  Fr.  Renaiss.,  Cambridge,  1904;  I.  303 
and  II.  254,  etc.  Compare  with  Seneca,  Montaigne's  ZJe  la 
Moderation,  De  la  ColBre,  Du  Jeune  Caton^  Des  Livres,  De  la 
Gloire,  etc. 

22.  Cf.  J.  E.  Spingarn,  Critical  Essays  of  the  17th  Century, 
Oxford,  1909;  I. Int.,  15,  36,  52,  etc.  F.  E.  Schelling,  Sanson's 
Timber,  Boston,  1892,  passim.  For  Shakespeare,  cf.  E.  A. 
Sonnenschein,  "Latin  as  an  Intellectual  Force  in  Civilization," 
in  National  Review,  XL VII.  670-683  (1906);  Sir  S.  Lee, 
Shakespeare  and  the  Modern  Stage,  New  York,  1906,  pp. 
152  ff. 

23.  Cf.  J.  Spedding,  Works  of  B.,  passim,  esp.  6.  274 
and  7.  120.  E.  G.  Bourne,  Seneca  and  the  Discovery  of 
America,  New  York,  1901.  I.  B.  Richman,  The  Spanish 
Conquerors,  New  Haven,  1919,  p.  17. 

24.  Cf.  Una  Birch,  Life  of  Anna  van  Schurman,  London, 
1909,  pp.  i6n.,  72,  167. 

25.  Forde,  Familiar  Letters,  ed.  A.  H.  Upham,  French  In- 
fluence in  English  Literature,  New  York,  1908,  p.  445.  ■] 

26.  Malebranche,  Tr.  de  Morale,  and  Rech.  de  la  VSritS, 

1.  17.  3;  2.  3.  4;  4.  10;  5.  2  and  4.    La  Bruyhie,  De l' Homme, 

2.  3  ff.  F&ielon,  Examen  de  Conscience.  Pascal,  Thoughts^ 
ed.  Wight,  Boston,  1884;    8.  13;   2.  13.    Bossuet,  Tr.  de  la 

[143] 


.  NOTES 

Concup.;   Sur  la  Lot  de  Dieu;    etc.  Cf.  H.  L.  Lear,  Bossiiet 
and  his  Contemporaries,  New  York,  1875,  P-  103. 

27.  E.  Godfrey,  A  Sister  of  Prince  Rupert,  pp.  170  ff. 

28.  John  Morley,  Diderot,  London,  1891;  2.  232  ff. 

29.  Cf.  Dartmouth  Address;  Journals,  4.  78,  etc.;  Books 
(Fireside  edn.,  7.  201);  Essay  on  Prudence, —  "Life  wastes 
itself  while  we  are  beginning  to  live,"  from  Sen.  Ep.  i;  and 
many  other  echoes.  See  also  Journals,  1820-4,  p.  203; 
1833-S,  p.  539;   and  1836-8,  p.  406. 


[144] 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

BoucHiER,  E.  S.,  Spain  under  the  Roman  Empire.    Oxford, 

1914. 
Clarke,  J.,  and  Geikie,  Sir  Archibald,  Physical  Science 

in  the  Time  of  Nero  (Being  a  Translation  of  the  Quaestiones 

Naturales  of  Seneca).    London,  1910. 
Frank,  T.,  Economic  History  of  Rome.  New  York,  1920. 
GuMMERE,  R.  M.,  Seneca  Ad  Lucilium  Epistiilae  Morales^ 

with    an   English    Translation,    in    The   Loeh    Classical 

Library.    New  York,  191 7  and  1920.     (vols.  I  and  II, 

ready;    with  bibliography). 
Lodge,  Thomas,  Translation  of  Seneca's  prose  works.   London, 

1614. 
PiCHON,  R.,  "Un  Philosophe  Ministre  sous  I'Empire  Romain," 

in  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  LIX.     363-394  (1910). 
Waltz,  Ren!;,  Vie  de  Sineque.     Paris,  1909  (with  biblio- 
graphy). 

Those  interested  in  the  Tragedies  of  Seneca,  which  this 
volume  does  not  aim  to  discuss,  may  consult:  Miller,  F.  J., 
The  Tragedies  of  Seneca  (translated  into  English  Verse). 
Chicago,  1907;  Seneca^ s  Tragedies y  with  an  English  Transla- 
tion, in  The  Loeh  Classical  Library.  2  vols.  New  York,  1917. 
Cunliffe,  J.  W.,  The  Influence  of  Seneca  on  Elizabethan 
Tragedy.  Manchester,  1893.  It  is  assumed  that  the 
Tragedies  are  genuine;  it  has  even  been  held  by  Pease, 
A.  S.,  "Is  the  Octavia  a  Play  of  Seneca?",  in  Classical  Journal, 
XV.  388-403  (1920),  that  the  Octavia,  that  melancholy 
drama  of  Nero's  first  wife,  comes  from  the  same  pen,  —  an 
experiment  in  contemporary  portrayal  which  was  rare  upon 
the  ancient  stage.  Cf.,  besides  Cunliffe,  op.  cit.,  Lucas,  F.  L., 
Seneca  and  Elizabethan  Tragedy.  Cambridge  University 
Press,  1922;  Thorndike,  A.  H.,  Tragedy.  Boston,  1908;  pp. 
33-75;    and  Schelling,   F.  E.,  Elizabethan  Drama.    Boston, 

1908;  I.  87  ff.,  n.  2  ff. 

[  145  ] 


iDat  SDtbt  to  (Btttct  anil  Wiome 


AUTHORS  AND  TITLES 


AUTHORS  AND  TITLES 

1.  Homer.    John    A.    Scott,  Northwestern    University. 

2.  Sappho.    David    M.    Robinson,    The   Johns    Hopkins 
University. 

3A.    EumpiDES.    F.  L.  Lucas,  King's  College,  Cambridge. 
3B.    Aeschylus  and  Sophocles.    J.  T.  Sheppard,  King's 
College,  Cambridge. 

4.  Aristophanes.    Louis  E.  Lord,  Oberlin  College. 

5.  Demosthenes.    Charles  D.  Adams,  DartmoiUh  College. 

6.  Aristotle's  Poetics.    La,ne  Cooper,  Cornell  University. 

7.  Greek  Historians.    Alfred  E.   Zimmern,   University 
of  Wales. 

8.  Lucian.    Francis    G.    Allinson,    Brown    University. 

9     Plautus    and    Terence.     Charles   Knapp,   Barnard 

College,    Columbia    University. 
loA.  Cicero.    John  C.  Rolfe,  University  of  Pennsylvania. 
lOB.  Cicero      as      Philosopher.      Nelson    G.   McCrea, 
Columbia  University. 

11.  Catullus.    Karl  P.  Harrington,  Wesleyan  University. 

12.  Lucretius       and       Epicureanism,    George    Depue 
Hadzsits,    University   of  Pennsylvania. 

13.  Ovid.     Edward  K.   Rand,  Harvard  University. 

14.  Horace.    Grant  Showerman,  University  of  Wisconsin. 

15.  Virgil.    John  William  Mackail,  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 

16.  Seneca.    Richard  Mott  Gummere,  The  William  Penn 
Charter  School. 

17.  Roman  Historians.    G.  Ferrero,  Florence. 

18.  Martial.    Paul   Nixon,   Bowdoin   College. 

19.  Platonism.    Alfred    Edward    Taylor,    St.    Andrew's 
University. 

20.  Aristotelianism.    John  L.  Stocks,  St.  John's  College, 
Oxford. 

21.  Stoicism.    RoheTtMa.rkWen\ey,Univ«rsity  of  Michigan. 

22.  Language  and  Philology.    Roland  G.  Kent,  University 
of  Pennsylvania. 

23.  Rhetoric   and  Literary  Criticism. 

24.  Greek    Religion.    Walter   W.   Hyde,    University   of 
Pennsylvania. 

25.  Roman  Religion.    Gordon  J.  Laing,  McGill  University, 

[  149  ] 


AUTHORS    AND     TITLES 

26.  Mythologies.    Jane  Ellen  Harrison,  Newnham  College, 
Cambridge. 

27.  Theories  Regarding  the  Immortality  of  the  Soul. 
Clifford  H.  Moore,  Harvard  University. 

28.  Stage   Antiquities.    James   T.   Allen,    University  of 
California. 

29.  Greek    Politics.    Ernest     Barker,     King's    CollegCy 
University   of  London. 

30.  Roman    Politics.    Frank    Frost    Abbott,    Princeton 
University. 

31.  Roman   Law.    Roscoe    Pound,   Harvard   Law   School. 

32.  Economics  and  Society.    M.  T.  Rostovtzeff,  University 
of  Wisconsin. 

33.  Military  and  Maritime  Antiquities.    E.  S.  McCart- 
ney, Northwestern  University. 

34- 

35.  Biology      and      Medicine.    Henry  Osbom  Taylor, 
New  York. 

36.  Mathematics.    David  Eugene  Smith,  Teachers'  College, 
Columbia  University. 

37.  Agriculture  and  Love  of  Nature. 

38.  Astronomy  and  Astrology.    Franz  Cumont,  Brussels. 

39.  The  Fine  Arts.    Arthur  Fairbanks,  Museum  of  Fine 
Arts,  Boston. 

40.  Architecture.    Alfred     M.     Brooks,     University    of 
Indiana. 

41.  Engineering.    Alexander  P.   Gest,  Philadelphia. 

42.  Greek  Private  Life,  Its  Survivals.    Charles  Burton 
Gulick,  Harvard  University. 

43.  Roman  Private  Life,  Its  Survivals.    Walton  B.  Mc- 
Daniel,  University  of  Pennsylvania. 

44.  Folk  Lore.    Campbell  Bonner,  University  of  Michigan. 

45.  Greek  and  Roman  Education. 

46.  Christian  Latin  Writers.    Andrew  F.  West,  Princeton 
University. 

47.  Roman  Poetry  and  Its  Influence  upon  European 
Culture.    Paul  Shorey,  University  of  Chicago. 

48.  Psychology. 

49.  Music. 

50.  Ancient  and  Modern  Rome.    Rodolfo  Lanciani,  Rome. 

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